… you have been warned…
Does your blog structure and design attract and hold on to readers?
As a blogger, one of the thoughts that is always playing at the back of my head is whether the structure and design of my blog represents me or my intent. I am constantly changing and rearranging and developing and improving my blog content and layout in order attract and hold on to readers.
The famous phrase, “content is king” is no doubt true to some extent but there are people who judge a blog by its outlook. I recently wrote 4 reasons why I unsubscribe from a blog and though I do not “discriminate” your blog by the way it looks, it is important to have a clean theme (not cluttered with ads that I am forced to sieve through them to get to the content). Lorelle, in her book and guest blogging stint at Problogger, describes the several first impressions that your blog makes as it struggles to attract and hold on to readers.
But apart from looking pretty and nice and dandy and all things sweet, you should also consider the usability, readability and accessibility of your blog, e.g.:
- Non-interference. Can your readers click through your content without distracting pop-ups, blinking objects or other things that get in the way?
- How many clicks? Anything that requires more than 3 clicks will make your readers click away.
- Think text, not pictures. Add images and multimedia as accessories to your blog content, not replacements.
- Posts linked together. Do you have a “Previous” and “Next” post links on every post?
- Home: If your readers get confused, can they easily return “home”?
- Choose a commonly available web font, a font size that is easy to read, and use font size and colour changes sparingly.
- Write short paragraphs instead of long chunks of unbroken text.
- Make sure your blog meets the web standards and pass a range of validation tests in accordance with the W3.org web standards.
- Allow access to the disabled, blind or visually-impaired.
- All images should be labeled with the ALT attribute to describe the image.
- All links should be labeled with the TITLE attribute to describe the link destination.
I have no idea what validations are and even if there are errors on my blog, I’d have no idea how to fix them. Now I understand why there are so many web consultants emerging like mushrooms after the rain :) They are the people who take care of the messy validation codes for you so that you could channel all your energy into building your blog PR and analyzing your statistics, heheehhe :D
Lorelle also mentions in her book that an ideal blog design is one that:
- loads in less than 10 seconds.
- never requires scrolling left or right or resizing the window.
- limits up and down scrolling.
- contains easy-to-find navigation.
- features design elements in common and familiar locations.
Does my blog load in less than 10 seconds? I understand that my sidebars load before my main content, which is “wrong” on many levels — or so I was told — but I have no idea what to do to them, so I shall leave them as they are at the moment :D And, do you find yourself scrolling too much when accessing my blog? Is it easy to navigate your way around, or is it too cluttered with unnecessary stuff?
Excerpt taken from Lorelle VanFossen’s recently published book, Blogging Tips: What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging. Have you ordered your copy yet?
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Agreed! It’s somewhat interesting to me to see how many blog themes out there (not just for WP) put the sidebar first. Especially from people who should know better like Derek Powazek’s DePo Clean Theme. I mean, Derek is a blogging god, and he’s easily one of the major factors in why I began blogging in the first place. But I’m not sure why his theme, which is EXCELLENT, puts the sidebar first. I think it’s to get it to float to the right and just above the main content. Anyway, I digress.
I really appreciate talking to you, Lorelle. I just watched a couple of your videos from WordCamp and I thought they were very good. Keep up the great blogging.
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#13 written by soufulow 4 years ago
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I love it when someone brown-noses, especially when they are blushing :D
I could talk for HOURS about SEO – oh wait, I have! Yes, the order of the structure really matters to search engines – but not so much to Google any more.
In the “old days” search engines had so much to search, they only scanned the first 1/3 or half of a web page before moving off. That’s when “content first” mattered most. Unfortunately, not all CSS designs can put content first and still work. That’s a major flaw in the design process as it currently stands.
“Other” search engines (whoever they are ;-) ) still may scan only the partial page, but Google now works with a checks and balances method that checks for changing in the page and if there are none in the first part of the page, they move on to the next and checks it for “new” stuff. Their first round through, triggered via pings, scans everything then checks against that record.
I still believe in “content first” and have battled the limitations of CSS over the years. I created one of the first templates that put content first, sidebar and footer at the end, breaking free of table-based designs in 2000. CSS was still in its infancy.
Ah, the good old days – bleck! You can have them! :D