Blog Design Tips

Blogging is one premier method of online business awareness of recent years and it has literally exploded with thousands of blogs being created every single day, but to focus on the topic at hand, many people simply don't put too much thought into their blogs design, so here are the important parts to think about when designing your blog.

First of all a blogs design must look reasonably professional or else who is going to take it seriously, if it looks so awful your momma won't make it some Sunday dinner!, although the idea is to not make it too distracting for the reader, the basics have to be there to make it easy to read and appealing for the reader and even casual visitor.

So perhaps the next design point is the layout and the navigation of your blogs content and pages, this has to be worked on, because if people can't find what they are looking for in the first few minutes of arriving at your blog, then they'll be off to another blog ad you'll never see or hear from them again boo hoo, I would add the archives, best posts and the subscribe button right at the top of your blogs side bar or even if your template supports it right at the top.

The best thing to do is to look at free blog template sites and see what the demo looks like for that template, so that you can get an idea of how your blog will look, so you can then plan out all of your navigational links ad other stuff.

Branding your blog is another vital step, by adding some blog branding to your blog that makes you the authority on your topics is the way to go, so maybe a prominent header graphic or logo would be nice, right at the top and if you can try and make it so that your header graphic appears on just the home page, because most times the header graphics may get in the way if they are too large and then try to use the logo on every other page, this is not really necessary but it is effective.

Keep everything tidy, one of the things that you may have seen quite often is blogs with minimal content but lots of banners in the sidebar and actually as blog posts and this produces a very cluttered blog that isn't actually a blog, it's just a place to dump advertising and these sites usually don't do that well as they aren't really niche content blogs, they just litter the Internet, but anyway Google is doing quite well at removing all of the irrelevant content, but still needs some way to go before it is junk free (will it ever though!?)

Organized categories, also are the best thing to do as they help people find your content easier and I would also have this near the top in the sidebar if possible, or at the very least, link to it and place the link near the top, you'll find that if you start categorizing your blogs content early on it will become a simplistic process that you will assimilate into your weekly blogging routines.

Decide early on what options you want to pursue to monetize your blog, CPA affiliate ads, Adsense or the vast amount of adsense alternatives that are out there, you may decide on releasing your own products, well this has to be planned and designed to fit your blog, so work on it and try and design a good product that will fit your blogs main topics well.

Don't forget your blog posts, that you can improve the layout of each of your posts with bullet points, bolded titles and words, as well as words in italics and underlines which make certain points stand out that you want emphasizing, and also remember that images can be sized to fit around your posts or the words to fit around the pictures with a bit of html basic knowledge, so always aim for posting content that makes it easier for the reader.

So to recap

Good banner for branding - If a template has a banner that you don't like, then you could create a far better one that brands your blog better and creates a brilliant first impression

Add your own images - Taking your own pictures works better for our blog, because you are then not worrying about copyright issues and they also help with your blog being found in image searches.

Most blogs come with RSS, so try and go with something like Feedburner, which has lots of other features which make it useful to help your blog grow in readership.

Just make sure you take the whole business of blogging seriously, to try and aim for realistic goals and to not get disappointed with low traffic, as the reason for blogging is supposed to be for fun and to show off who you are, so stick with it.