Welcome to part 2 of my blog design series.
7. Content
Don’t just regurgitate what you’ve already seen, try to be different and add value to your site. The better the quality of your content the deeper the relationship with your readers. Make your blog a place that you would want to visit. Not one that talks about how great you are! People visit your blog ultimately because they want to learn from you – not about you.
Let the power of your content do the talking for you. Content over design not design over content. They don’t exist in isolation but design must support content not distract from it.
8. Personality
You want to inject your own personality into your work and this is really important with regard to building a relationship with your subscribers. You can do this through your writing style and by letting readers get to know more of the real you by sharing some things from your personal life. I’m not talking about disclosing everything but let people get to know more about the real you.
You can express yourself creatively on your personal pages but for your business pages keep it simple. You can do this without the use of lots of fancy graphics which only detract from your overall message. You might also think you have a great sense of humour but what one person finds amusing another might not. I’m not talking about being bland but I know I’ve been turned off from sites where you have to wade through an author’s “amusing” anecdotes to find useful information.
9. Categories
I would consider using nested categories like you will see in my nav bar. This allows you to organize your content into much more specific categories and enable people to find relevant content much more quickly. Name your categories appropriately. Keep them succinct yet descriptive. 1-2 words ideally.
10. Permalinks
I use the format http://johnszram.com/post_title. I like to keep my titles really descriptive. You can tell what this post is about from it’s web address. I don’t worry about writing for the search engines. My aim is to provide you with quality information. I might lose out on some traffic short term but I’m in this for the long haul and my relationship with my readers is more important.
11. Search
As your blog grows it is going to become increasingly important for people to be able to find content quickly and easily. Provide a search box and also provide an archive section and links to your archived pages. I don’t recommend a calendar it takes up too much space and why would you click on it if you don’t know what content you are going to find on that page. A search box is better and much more targeted.
12. Returning Visitors
Don’t forget your returning visitors. You know that you need to build relationships online so don’t forget your current readership. You want to make sure that returning visitors have a great experience too and aren’t pestered by your ads or welcome messages. Return visitors should easily find your new posts as they should be displayed above the fold.
13. RSS Feed
Provide a button for your RSS feed. I’d recommend signing up with FeedBurner and running your feed through their service since you get access to countless extra features that will improve the user experience. This is something I will be blogging about at a later date.
14. Social Bookmarking
Make it easy for people to share your content. Provide links so your readers can Digg, Stumble and bookmark your posts. My advice is add the ShareThis widget. There are countless others that do a similar job but this is the one I find works best. I’ll be talking about the specific plugins I use on Friday.
If you find this post to be useful please hit the ShareThis button below now and spread the word! Parts 3 and 4 to follow.
