One of the forum that I visit regularly had a thread about what you should not do when designing your website or blog.

Here’s my list of blog design – “what not to wear”

• Autoplay video
• Autoplay music
• flashy buttons
• too many buttons (put them in a roll up menu if you must have them)
• advertisements that take up the whole header area making me scroll to see the actual header and posts below.
• Too many advertisements – don’t do the max Google Adsense – you actually make less money from them if you do too many!!! Plus it turns off your visitors.
• Pages with so many plug ins, large file size images, buttons etc that make the page really slow to load- or worse cause it to freeze when loading.
• Text that is hard to read – white on black doesn’t work if you are trying to read a long post – light gray text works better … same for florescent coloured text on black or white backgrounds, or neon backgrounds with black or white text.
• no paragraphs – this makes posts very hard to read. If you want visitors to come back or stay on your site for a while use paragraphs.
• Set your posts so that only 5 or 10 display on the main page!!!! We don’t need to see everything you’ve ever written on your blog for the last two years!

Tips!

Use roll up menus in your sidebars if you have lots of buttons or blogrolls etc. It really makes the page look so much tidier.

Test your blog design in Firefox, Internet explorer, Opera and Netscape – all easy to download and have on your computer. Make sure your site loads correctly and works well in all the browsers listed above,

Also look at your site on different computers. Text and background colour might look great on your monitor, but really bad on 5 other computer monitors that you test it on.

As I said in the last point- visitors only need to see your last 5 or 10 posts when they load your page. If you have more than that showing your page will load very slowly.

Same with categories and archives. Do your visitors need to see your archives dating back to 2001? That’s a long list taking up valuable blog sidebar real estate. Use a roll up menu or modify the code in your page so that only 5 or 10 archives and or categories are viewed.

Every once in a while ask your readers their opinion on your page. Ask for constructive criticism. If the majority of your readers state they don’t like something or that your page loads slowly – do something about it.

I’m sure I could add many more points to this post, but I think this is enough to get you started.