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Effective blog design includes the design of a blog itself, its navigation elements, and its communication tools. Blogs have a lot of standard elements, articles, comments, categories, and archives; all of which need to be presented well within the blog template design.
Those elements put a lot of constraint on what is possible with a blog design. You should be focusing on making sure your blog is easy to navigate to find the content and easy for visitors to connect with the blogger.
1. Make your purpose clear:
Your blog banner should have a title and subtitle that make it clear who you are and what you write about. First-time visitors to your blog will leave in a hurry if they can’t quickly determine what you’re about.
2. Keep it simple:
There are so many different options you can integrate into your blog, from colors to widgets, that it is often tempting to pile on too many. The result is a cluttered blog that is frustrating to navigate and visually chaotic. Review your blog every few months to determine whether any of the elements have become outdated or no longer relevant, and remove them.
3. Show images or photograph:
Yes, your text is important. However, no-one’s going to read through paragraph upon paragraph of copy. Reading online is very different from reading on paper. Break up your text with a large quote, an image or photograph. This also adds more interest for the reader. People like to look at pictures.
4. Use a colour scheme:
There’s no doubt that an aesthetically pleasing colour scheme can improve the browsing experience. If you’re unsure about which colours go together you can sample some with this free online colour scheme generator.
5. Make your borrowed template your own
There is no such thing as a completely original template. All are variations of one theme or another so you don’t have to start from scratch. The most important place to start with is your top banner because that is the first thing your readers will see. When making a banner consider your blog’s niche and design something that is relevant to your topic.
6. Put your RSS newsfeed link somewhere prominent on your site:
The best place for that is near the top of your template as well as at the bottom of each post. Use a nice image and make it a clickable link.
7. Make your blog look B-I-G-G-E-R:
What I mean by that is most users today are using large monitors. Chances are your blog has been designed to fit the old small monitors and so it will look like a teeny-weeny spec on anything that is 19 inches or larger.
The easy way to make your blog look bigger is to increase the size of the post body area (that’s where all your posts go) and your sidebar. Once you have done that you can also increase the font size a little, but don’t go overboard because most modern browsers today already have a feature for making fonts larger.
If you ever need a guest speaker on this issue let me know. I run my own internet site with similar information and thought maybe we could exchange expertise… It might help us equally!