5 Characteristic of a Good Blog Design
I was once an online game player and was very poor. I had no gold for my character because I spent all my gold for my equipments but not on the accessories. Since my character had no accessories to show off. Whenever I tried to ask people with the same level, same status but different accessories to join my party, what I get is rejection.
This is what happen when we’re not building a good image, it applies the same in blog. People will be hesitated to build relationship with you if your blog design is not notable at all.
I often see a blog with a lot of ads, some of the optimized for Adsense template can be found around the web.
The design above shows us an optimized adsense blog design, but I won’t use that template since it contains one of my defined bad blog design characteristic.
So what makes a good blog design?
1. Relevancy Between Content, Author and Design
Ever visited a blog with colorful design talking about how to earn money online? My first thought will be like this “Is this guy for sure? With this colorful page, is he serious making money online?”. And I’ll read his content, then realize his writing is not as colorful as his blog design.
The blog above is written by a 14 years old young kids. The yellow color give us a hyper-active feeling and you can see her writing is energetic too. The balance between the content and design reflect the author.
2. Guiding Readers to The Content
A good blog design is able to help your readers to navigate your blog. It tells readers where they should go after visiting your home page or finished reading your blog post.
Copyblogger.com embeds the left sidebar only with subscribing button and the resources from his blog. As the readers open up his homepage, the left resources button will give them the chance to dig deeper into his blog.
Another example of good blog design is making use of the navigation bar to guide readers.
Abloggerblog.com is making use of his navigation bar efficiently promoting his blog posts. We can see his latest post and what this blog have in his homepage without scrolling the bar. Once you click the post link, you’ll find the subscribing button on the corner right.
3. Clear and Contrast Between Font Color and Background Color
The use of font can be one of the fatal killer move for a blog design. A misused background and font color can kill your reader’s eyes.
You can measure the contrast between the font and the background with this color contrast tool.
Measuring the contrast between your font and background color not only let you know if the current font color is readable enough for your readers but also can give you more option in choosing color.
4. The Art of Choosing Image
Slicing, cropping, choosing font, arranging layer. That’s what I do with the photos I intend to use in my blog post. Before I start to use image in blog post, I never realize there was so many type of image and tools we can use to edit photo.
One of my favorite blog, Skelliewag.org uses flickr photo in her blog post. Choosing the image with flickr is not an easy skill but with some learning and using Picnik for basic editing can give your blog post another professional look which will give additional plus into your blog design.
5. Simplicity Makes Me Easy
Do you know why some people prefer fast food? I don’t like fast food but whenever I need to get something to eat but clueless, I will order fast food. Sometimes when I hang out with my friends at mall and they ask me “What shall we eat?”, to make it simple I’ll answer “KFC”.
Another characteristic of blog design is making simple. If you can remove unnecessary navigation bar, categories, widget then remove it. Because a simple blog design can show the reader what this blog about. A good example of can be found in the Skelliewag blog design.
By limiting the use of categories and the navigation bar can show the information you has in your blog.
Ask Your Reader
Take this question and include it in your next blog post.
“What does my blog design tell you when you visit my blog for the first time, what is my blog content judging from the homepage alone?”
ablogger.com Review
Sing by Sayz
I am a man who only review the blog I like and provide quality contents… la… la… la…
Do you want to know how to start a decent blog? Blogging has become one of the tool to express ourselves online and some people already generate income from it. Despite what is your goal to blog, you need to learn basic if you start from zero. And the blog I’m going to review will be one of your solution.
abloggerblog.com
abloggerblog.com is a blog focusing in “Blog Coaching” which I believe most of the newbie blogger need to learn some skills step by step. There are many factors in blogging, so if you’re guided then the chance you don’t need to recreate blog is higher (Blogger at least delete their blog once and start anew).
The blog has a decent amount of quality articles for blogger to read. List of the blog fundamental and the SEO tools where every blogger need it. Every blogger have their own unique style, even in the SEO and how they generate traffic. But every blogger need to learn this, TAO? Trial And Error phase. Now you can learn how to blog properly with the course which only need 2 months (I assume) rather than TAO for 1 year.
Blog design is made as simple as it can. And the font size is big enough for every reader to read. At least, don’t broke these simple rules of blog design.
The author of the blog is a 22 years old man from Singapore who start blogging 1 years ago. His name is Felix or Wei Liang. He achieves 590.201 in Alexa rank and 50++ readers in a short amount of time.
How to Generate a Unique Blog
Original Image by : Torley
I’ve been wondering what do I need to create a unique blog. We can start by defining the meaning of “unique”.
Unique (p): (followed by `to’) applying exclusively to a given category or condition or locality; “a species unique to Australia”
Singular: the single one of its kinds; “a singular example”; “the unique existing example of Donne’s handwriting”; “a unique copy of an ancient manuscript”; “certain types of problems have unique solutions”
highly unusual or rare but not the single instance; “spoke with a unique accent”; “had unique ability in raising funds”; “a frankness unique in literature”; “a unique dining experience”
What is a unique blog to me?
A unique blog is a blog where it is different in their own ways, very unusual and we can’t find it on every blog. It can be unique in the design, writing style, marketing style, etc.
As you can see, if we want to create a unique blog, we must be different. Not only in blog design, but also in writing style and the ways we present something. We can have the same content, but we can be different by using a different approach.
How to make a unique blog?
Until we start to do the thing we like, we will never bring out our personality into our blog. We won’t be able to create something unique if we are imitating. If we want to be unique, we must learn how to express our feeling. I won’t be able to guide you when it comes to generate a unique blog, but I can share with you some of the tips that can get you started.
Be Personal
Getting personal doesn’t mean you blog all your personal life. But we bring our personal style and like into the blog. Try to start from your blog design, use the color you love and the layout you prefer. Don’t worry if anyone can read your writing or not, but do something you like first. And you can correct it later, because blogs are like people. They grow and become more mature along the author.
Researching
Even though we need to become selfish when trying to create a unique blog, the selfishness can be balanced by adding researching into our process. Because the readers that will judge if your blog is unique and bring out your personality or not. Whatever the change you make, a further researching can make your blog get a better score in that area.
Try Something You’ve Never Tried
We’re growing very fast when we were baby. The reasons why a baby can learn how to walk and communicate so fast just because they don’t stop learning and try something new. When they know walking is difficult, they’ll try to grab something nearby them to help them learning faster.
How about you? Do you want to stop trying something that you’ve never tried? Something which might be able to make your blog unique?
Continue When You Feel Good with it
Every human have an ability to judge if something is worth to continue or not. When you feel good to implement these new things, the further steps is to continue doing it.
Will you stop doing the things you like at first? Yes, and your judgement will make you stop doing it when the time comes.