Blog Tip #2: Find A Good Design
If you can’t make your own web design, find a design that would fit the overall theme of your blog. There are lots of free templates out there that you can customize to your own liking.
With that in mind, here are some tips on how to find the best design for your blog:
Site Navigation
Make sure that your site navigation is in an obvious place. Don’t make your visitors think. Place your site’s navigation on the top part part of your blog, where visitors do not have to scroll down. Another one of my pet peeves is an image map navigation. Sometimes the images do not load. If you still insist on having an image map navigation, make sure you have an alternative set of text links.
Choose the right colors
If you want to attract a certain type of audience, find a color scheme that is fitting to them. Limit the color palettes to 3 colors or 5 colors maximum. You don’t want to overwhelm your visitors. Some may may think that your color overuse is tacky and cheap. You may need a ColorSchemer gallery to find the best colors for your website.
Make it readable
By that, I mean, use appropriate fonts. There are lots of fonts out there and you can customize them to any size. Your best bet is a serif font, Georgia is one of my favorites. You can never go wrong with Arial, Geneva, Courier and Times, while Verdana is said to be the easiest to read on the screen. Make sure that the size of your font is not too big or too small. Please do not use 7pt as your font size.
Use CSS
Cascading Style Sheets is essential to maintain the consistency of your design. It makes it possible to separate different styles for different sections of your blog pages. It is easy to learn CSS because it is very straightforward. You can find different tutorials online if you want to become an expert. Well, you have to be an expert, or at least get the grasp of CSS if you want have a good design.
Make it flexible
We are aware that there are other web browsers out there besides Internet Explorer. Test your designs in other browsers, too, like Mozilla Firefox or Opera. What looks good in IE may be a disaster in Firefox. You don’t want to drive Firefox users away. Majority of online users are not using IE anymore.
Keep those simple tips in mind in order to find an effective design for your blog, but remember, a good design does not equal good content. I’ve seen a lot of websites out there that have a really good design, but lacks an appealing content. Are you one of them?
Tags: Blog Tips
March 18th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
I have just found a design that I like.
but after reading this article, I’m thinking about changing it again/.
Kevin Paquet’s last blog post..ATTENTION PINOY BLOGGERS
July 22nd, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Design really is so important. A lot of bloggers spend time writing great articles but people never get far enough down the page to see the first headlines because they are turned away by the sites design. Youve got good advice here.