Yes, You Can Judge a Book By Its Cover: Blog Design Considerations

Many of us have an almost childlike desire for ideas to be judged on their own merits and not by their presentation. We imagine it would be nice if every idea could be heard for the validity of its claims rather than being judged on the merits or shortcomings of the messenger. But in practice, none of us really believe this. When was the last time you really appreciated the look of a spinning.gif? Has the Comic Sans font ever made you stop and take a closer look at an article? Can you honestly say that a mix of very bright colors does not drive you away from a website?

Okay, these are perhaps extreme examples, but they do illustrate the point that appearance is still considered important. And not all examples are so simple; sometimes the text is too small and poorly spaced to read properly, the lack of images makes the site too text dense, the color tone is subtly off in a way that looks off-putting and turns away potential readers or all the images and videos are on the main page, which makes them take too long to load.

Paying attention to the look and feel and a few blog and web design basics can make visiting your blog more enjoyable for your audience and help you retain those vital traffic numbers.

First, the background

The website your blog is on needs to adhere to some basic web design principles. After all, you don’t want people to click away from an unattractive site before reaching your life-changing content, do you?

First, choose a reasonable color scheme. Strongly contrasting tones are a good start. Black text on a white background is highly visible, if a bit dull, and can be seen as a reliable standby. Background colors should be in complementary tones to the primary tones. Consider the default WordPress site settings, for example. The primary fields are white, with other colors in grays and pale blues that complement the overall look but subtly convey a sense of where everything is. Important features like social sharing tabs, links, and scroll bars are in deeper blues for easy differentiation.

Keep special keys to a minimum. Simple effects are nice, like a short, direct fade in for your text. If, on the other hand, each word has to fly letter by letter with a cute sound effect, you may lose some audiences due to impatience. If you must include effects, keep them simple and integrated rather than conspicuous. Also, keep sizes reasonably large for easy viewing, but not so large as to require a lot of scrolling on an average laptop.

Blog Design, Front and Center

There are many ways to organize blog content, but as always, using a few best principles will help you get the most out of your content.

First of all, remember that the purpose of the blog is to transmit information. You can’t do that buried in the back pages, so whether your blog is the entire site or a part of a larger site, the relevant information needs to be on the front page, in a prominent place. Headlines should be links to the body of articles, and of a size that makes them easy to pay attention to without cluttering the page with absurdly large text.

One key is to make liberal use of the “more” function. Also called a jumpcut, this is essentially a trick similar to the way news shows keep people’s attention during the broadcast. The front page of the site should have a very small number of posts, consisting of the blog title, a few lines or a paragraph of introductory text, and then a tab that says “more,” “keep reading,” or something to that effect. style. . The rest of the content of the article is accessed through this link.

The jumpcut is a good tool because it allows you to display a large amount of content that is easy to navigate. Use the trick of newspaper writing to get a short summary of your article in front of people so they can quickly decide which articles to follow. Putting the full article on the front page unnecessarily stretches it out and makes it more difficult to scroll through and select quality articles, especially for new readers who come to your blog after a while.

Finally, make sure your blog content is easy to navigate. Each blog should be tagged for content and there should be a panel to browse articles by tags. These tags are a great place to embed SEO keywords, by the way – choose tags that are trending high in AdWords if you can. There should be a best of breed dashboard that displays favorite or very popular blog posts as well as a search function.

As always, engage in good linking practices too, with links to other blogs that are relevant to the content you provide, displayed prominently but not particularly large. Keep it to five or six links that you think are particularly relevant, with a short summary of each.