Blog design doesn’t matter, long live blog design!

Confused yet? Web design, like graphic design, is at it’s core, communication. Is your site communicating clearly? Here are a few things you should consider when looking at blog designs.

• Legibility
• Readability – I’ll explain why I’m listing this separately from legibility in a moment.
• Good navigation
• Consistent formatting
• Don’t annoy your viewers!
• It’s all about the feed

Legibility is a bigger factor than you might think. Some blogs are hard to read. You can play around with decorative fonts and flashy colors if you want. When you get to the content though, use something that’s easy to read. Dark text on a light background is probably your safest choice. Reversing those is also possible, but a noticeable percentage of people find light text on a dark background straining to the eyes. Do you use bold and italic a lot? This too can be difficult to read. Used as an accent they’re perfectly acceptable, but use them carefully. They are to add emphasis where needed, and not everything needs emphasis. Keep this in mind while considering blog designs… If they can’t read it, they won’t come back.

Readability and legibility are really the same thing. That said, there is another aspect of legibility that you should consider. Even when you’re using a perfectly legible font, are you adding something in the way of formatting or organization that makes your site difficult to read? To many graphics? Too much color? Unusual or confusing formatting? Look over your design and see if something can be interfering with your reader’s ability to read the text. What did I ask you to keep in mind? If they can’t read it, they won’t come back.

Navigation is also often overlooked. Someone at Websites that Suck coined the phrase Mystery Meat Navigation for a reason. Your navigation should be intuitive. Anyone with a minimum of web experience should be able to navigate your site within a few minutes. If that’s not the case, then you have a problem. If they can’t navigate it, then they won’t find what they want, and therefore can’t read it. If they can’t read it, they won’t come back.

Formatting is important in one sense, and not in others. The finer details of formatting are important for the overall style, but they won’t make or break a site’s traffic for the most part unless they’re quite atrocious. What is important is that formatting is consistently used. If you format consistently, people know what to expect, and reading becomes easier. If your formatting is always changing, readers can’t “learn” how to read the site. You may have heard this before, but if they can’t read it, they won’t come back.

Don’t annoy your viewers may seem like a stupid point to make, but it really isn’t. Animation may be cool, but a lot of people find it annoying. Splash screens have been popular before, and likely will be again, but some people hate them. Adding music on your site may seem like the perfect thing to do, but a lot of people wish you wouldn’t. Adding 478 images down your sidebar may seem like a good idea, but how many of your viewers use dial-up? While your site is designed for you, its real target audience is the viewer. Keep this in mind, because if you annoy them, they won’t come back.

Always keep in mind your RSS feed. It gets it’s content from your posts. An RSS feed ignores your default settings like font, and color, but it remembers formatting you add within your post. It remembers things like bold and italic, underlines and strikethroughs, photos, graphics, and bad links you forgot to fix. In a lot of ways an RSS feed is less forgiving than a regular web page. I strongly suggest that you subscribe to your own site’s feed so that you can make sure that it’s functioning. The people who are reading you feed fall into three basic categories. Your loyal readers, people in a hurry, and those using a reader because of some sight related disability. All three of these groups are going to be annoyed if your feed is not functioning or otherwise unreadable. What have I been drilling into you? If they can’t read it, they won’t come back.

I love a good website design. If you have good content though, and keep these few things in mind, your readers will keep coming back, regardless of your design. Blog design doesn’t matter, long live blog design!

Trackposted to Blue Star Chronicles, Perri Nelson’s Website, A Blog For All, The Random Yak, Conservative Thoughts, The World According to Carl, Right Voices, and Pursuing Holiness, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.