Blog design rules are not set in stone by any mean, but there are a few things that you can do when designing your blog that really will hurt your blog’s success. While we all like to believe that the content is more important than the design, there is just no getting around the fact that the blog design is what your visitors use and see when they navigate your awesome content. If you make dumb mistakes when you design your blog you can outright prevent your reader to read any further, subscribe to your blog, or buy something.

1. No Author Photo
Even weblogs that provide author bios often omit the author photo. A photo is important for two reasons:

• It offers a more personable impression of the author. You enhance your credibility by the simple fact that you’re not trying to hide. Also, users relate more easily to somebody they’ve seen.
• It connects the virtual and physical worlds. People who’ve met you before will recognize your photo, and people who’ve read your site will recognize you when you meet in person (say, at a conference — or the company cafeteria if you’re an intranet blogger).

A huge percentage of the human brain is dedicated to remembering and recognizing faces. For many, faces work better than names. I learned this lesson myself in 1987 when I included my photo in a HyperCard stack I authored that was widely disseminated on Mac-oriented BBSs. Over the next two years, countless people came up to me and said, “I liked your stack,” having recognized me from the photo.

Also, if you run a professional blog and expect to be quoted in the press, you should follow the recommendations for using the Web for PR and include a selection of high-resolution photos that photo editors can download.

2. Ads > Content

Don’t make the mistake of making your ads more prominent than your content. This practice makes the ads very distracting and is only going to make your visitors more likely to leave before they read anything. They will leave your blog because you communicated to them that your ads are more important than your content.

All you have to do to avoid this mistake is place the ads on the side or at the bottom of posts where people expect to find them.

3. Make the content scannable:

This is the Internet, not a book, so forget large blocks of text. Probably I will be visiting your site while I work on other stuff so make sure that I can scan through the entire content. Bullet points, headers, subheaders, lists. Anything that will help the reader filter what he is looking for.

4. Large blocks of text

Large blocks of text is likely to remind your readers of high school English class and very few people have fond memories of those times. So don’t make the mistake of making your blog hard to read by having large blocks of text with no hierarchy.

5. Nondescript Posting Titles
Sadly, even though weblogs are native to the Web, authors rarely follow the guidelines for writing for the Web in terms of making content scannable. This applies to a posting’s body text, but it’s even more important with headlines. Users must be able to grasp the gist of an article by reading its headline. Avoid cute or humorous headlines that make no sense out of context.

Your posting’s title is micro content and you should treat it as a writing project in its own right. On a value-per-word basis, headline writing is the most important writing you do.

Descriptive headlines are especially important for representing your weblog in search engines, newsfeeds (RSS), and other external environments. In those contexts, users often see only the headline and use it to determine whether to click into the full posting. Even if users see a short abstract along with the headline (as with most search engines), user testing shows that people often read only the headline. In fact, people often read only the first three or four words of a headline when scanning a list of possible places to go. Sample bad headlines:

• What Is It That You Want?
• Hey, kids! Comics!
• Victims Abandoned

Sample good headlines:

• Pictures from Die Hunns and Black Halos show
• Office Depot Pays United States $4.75 Million to Resolve False Claims Act Allegations
  (too long, but even if you only read the first few words, you have an idea of what it’s about)
• Ice cream trucks as church marketing

This last headline works on a church-related blog. If you’re writing an ice cream industry blog, start the headline with the word “church” because it’s the information-carrying word within a context of all ice cream, all the time.

In browsing weblog headline listings to extract these examples, I noticed several headlines in ALL CAPS. That’s always bad. Reading speed is reduced by 10% and users are put off by the appearance of shouting.

6. Irregular Publishing Frequency:
Establishing and meeting user expectations is one of the fundamental principles of Web usability. For a weblog, users must be able to anticipate when and how often updates will occur.

For most weblogs, daily updates are probably best, but weekly or even monthly updates might work as well, depending on your topic. In either case, pick a publication schedule and stick to it. If you usually post daily but sometimes let months go by without new content, you’ll lose many of your loyal — and thus most valuable — readers.

Certainly, you shouldn’t post when you have nothing to say. Polluting cyberspace with excess information is a sin. To ensure regular publishing, hold back some ideas and post them when you hit a dry spell.

7. Do not require a registration unless it is necessary:

lets put this straight, when I browse around the Internet I want to get information, not the other way around. Do not force me to register up and leave my email address and other details unless it is absolutely necessary (i.e. unless what you offer is so good that I will bear with the registration).

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