1. A Clear and Appealing Header
This is the first impression for most blogs. It’s on the top of the site, it’s generally the image that loads first. It’s what sets the tone for the site. The header doesn’t have to be fancy or professionally designed. It should, however, contain your site’s name and should set the tone for what’s on the site. This site, for example, has a fairly simple header. It does, however contain a clear site title and tagline while looking good (if I must say so myself).
2. Content and ad Separation
While you do want your ads to be “clickable”, you don’t want them to be confusing. Don’t deceive your readers into clicking an ad. That’ll get someone to not come back to your site. When it comes to your content, make it easy to read and difficult to get distracted by what’s around it. Your ads and promotional stuff should compliment your content, not distract people from it.
3. A Simple Top Menu
Try not to have 2 rows of menu options. A menu should be a quick way to reference key parts of your blog, not a way to sort out everything on your site. The menu should have a “home” and “about” section among other sections that you deem important enough to highlight as a top menu item. I will reference this site as an example. I’ve got some important parts on the top menu, but did not include every single thing I writer about here.
4. Make Sharing Easy
One thing you definitely don’t want to do is to deny someone who wants to share your content. If someone gets the idea to share your content in their head, you certainly don’t want to make them search around for a share button. Having share buttons at the top of the post does not make sense. How would someone know whether they want to share your post at the top of the post? Putting the share buttons at the bottom of the post, right after the content, is the perfect place for a share button. Right after someone reads your post, there’s an option to share. That makes perfect sens, doesn’t it? This concept is also true for comments.
5. Simple Background
Don’t make your readers dizzy with your background. Keep your background simple. Even plain white is perfectly fine. Your background does not have to be fancy, it’s exactly that – a background. Here’s a more detailed post about taking it easy on your website’s background.
6. Lay off of the Cursive
Cursive may be nice looking, but lumped together in a 30 line blog post, and your readers will have trouble reading it. Cursive is not what people are used to reading in long posts. Take a look at the cursive fonts here. None of them are easy to read in a long post. Then, think about how easy this post is to read. The font is simple, clean and is what you are used to reading. Don’t get caught up trying to be fancy and unique in your font selection. That being said, cursive works well as a heading or subtitle, just not as the entire post font.
7. Length of Homepage
The standard Blogger settings are to show 10 posts per page. If you tend to create long posts, that can mean your homepage takes a long time to load. If you average 2-3 pictures per post, that’s 20-30 pictures that have to load for your homepage to be fully loaded. Plus, if the posts are long, that’s a TON of scrolling per page. Consider changing it to 5 posts per page. Here’s how you do it:
Change that number “10″ to the number of posts you want per page. I recommend 4-6 per page.
8. Have Clean Sidebars
Try to keep your sidebars clean and as uncluttered looking as possible. It’s normal to have ads there, just try and make them look as good as possible. It is imperative that you make sure everything in your sidebar fits. There’s not a lot that looks worse than having ads or images spill over your sidebar’s boundaries. You can also improve the look by having sidebar titles for certain items. They can serve as little guides for navigating a site’s sidebar(s). As you see on Katie Did What, she has small titles for sections of her sidebar. The titles match the top menu and go with the rest of the design. Having sidebar titles makes it easier to navigate and makes it look more like a part of your site.
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