How to Make Your Blog’s Design More Enticing
How to Make Your Blog’s Design More Enticing
By: Maurine Anderson
The overall look of your blog has a significant impact on whether visitors read your content, on whether they navigate to other pages, and ultimately on how long they spend on your website. In short, your blog’s design truly can make or break the popularity of your blog. So how do you make sure that your blog’s design is truly enticing? Here are some tips to keep in mind as you create a blog design that is sure to draw visitors into your site.
Use high quality photos.
This can’t be stressed enough. Instead of taking slapdash photos on your phone’s camera and uploading them to your blog without making any adjustments, you’re going to need to pay some attention to detail. This means using well exposed, well balanced photos—and resizing those photos to fit the width of your blog post area exactly. Making it a habit to use correctly sized, high quality photos will give your blog a much more professional feel, which is sure to draw in more visitors.
Feature easy navigation.
As this article details, your site’s navigation should make your site as user friendly as possible. Easy navigation has the power to carry users through your website very quickly, and can can really influence how much time a user spends on your site. Keep your navigation prominent, such as just below the header of your website. More sophisticated websites will even include a feature that adds a horizontal navigation to the top of the window when the user scrolls down below the main navigation at the top of the page.
Navigation should also give visitors an instant, broad overview of what’s on your site. When visitors can get a quick overview of your site, they are less likely to become confused and more likely to stick around on your site. A good way to approach your navigation is to first ask yourself: “which major categories would I use to organize all of my content?”
If you run a lifestyle blog, for example, and you tend to share cake recipes, playlists, and photography, then “recipes,” “music,” and “photography” might become three different options that you’ll be able to select from your navigation menu (along with the usual “about me,” “contact,” and “FAQ” pages). Each navigation option would then lead you to either a static page or to an archive page that organizes older posts.
Make it cohesive.
Instead of filling your site with standard social media buttons, plain links to other pages on your site, etc., customize these elements to suit the overall design of your site. Your design needs to be cohesive. If your site has a primarily geometric design and feel to it, for example, you might use triangle-shaped social media buttons in various colors that match your palette.
If your blog is rich in pastels, then maybe you’ll make the “about me,” “contact,” “sponsor,” and “FAQ” buttons in your sidebar various pastel colors. If you’re going for a clean, minimalist look that favors lots of white, then maybe you’ll make several of the “featured post” images in your sidebar circular in order to incorporate more white. Defining a color palette and list of one or two fonts are great ways to really tie things together in your site’s design.
Make elements continuous throughout your site.
Remember: when looking to improve your blog’s design, you need to take into account the fact that not everyone is going to see your home page first. In fact, if you have blog post links scattered all around the Internet (and chances are you do if you’re a blogger), then visitors to your site likely aren’t going to see your home page first. So it isn’t just about your home page here. Your blog design needs to feature stunning elements that are continuous throughout your entire site. This includes things like a bold header, a footer, navigation elements, social media buttons, and a sidebar if there is one.
Put your all into every post.
With this in mind, you really need to consider the overall look of every blog post that you publish, because every post has the potential to serve as a landing page for visitors to your site. Some elements of an eye-catching blog post: a clear and attention-grabbing headline; an image at the top of every post; a healthy balance between text and images; and text that is organized with line breaks, subheadings, and bullet points as needed (and therefore easy to skim).