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12 Blog design tips to keep your visitors and advertisers happy

One of the forums I’m on has a discussion about best blogging practices. Here’s a few tips that I just added to the thread that you might consider for your own blog design. I’ve written these suggestions mainly with bloggers who write posts for which they get compensation by advertisers in mind, but I think these suggestions are good guidelines for most bloggers.

It’s nice when a blog design reflects your personal style or co-ordinates well with your niche topic.

If you are writing posts for compensation or selling ad space in you sidebar your blog should probably have a professional image. This doesn’t mean plain and boring.

1. If you are using a standard template that 1000’s of other bloggers are using personalize it in some way to reflect your blogs style. If you aren’t sure how to do this ask people on a web forum or hire someone to spruce up your site.

2. Avoid flashing buttons and images.

3. For the most part write your posts in one color of text and one font size. (There are some blogs with multicolored posts and I find them hard to read.)

4. Make sure that the font that you’ve chosen for your blog is easy to read and is of a color that can be read easily against the background color of your blog. Bright white text on dark or black backgrounds tires the eye quickly and is hard to read. If your blog has a dark background a light gray text seems to work best.

* In general I think dark blog backgrounds are frowned upon by quite a few bloggers (and possibly advertisers). Why? I’m not sure, but I think it’s mainly because they are often harder to read and as a result are thought of as not being well designed.

5. Avoid autoplay music! I think the majority of bloggers dislike autoplay music on blogs. If you want to have music on your site please have it in the off mode and let your visitors turn it on if they want to hear it.

You want your visitors to read your posts. It’s hard to concentrate sometimes when music is blaring at you, particularly if the visitor doesn’t like that style of music.

6. Avoid autoplay video. See above. Let your visitors turn the videos on if they want to view them. Anything autoplay is distracting.

7. Try to make sure that your visitors can navigate your site easily. You may actually see your traffic or page views increase if you follow some of these suggestions:

– Think about making your post titles clickable so visitors can easily read the comments that have been left on the post and possibly add their own.

– Likewise be sure that your visitors can see the comment link easily so that they can leave a comment if they want to.

– I’m sure advertisers love to see comments on posts, I know regular site visitors do, so do everything possible to make it easier for your visitors to leave you a comment. That includes not making your visitors register to your site just to leave a comment.

8. At the end of your main page, and possibly on your single posts, have navigation tags so that your visitors can easily move to the next page or next post.

9. If you like buttons or if you have very long blogrolls, categories, or archives think about moving them to pages rather than keeping them in your sidebar, or try drop down menus. Your sidebar will look less cluttered and your page might load faster.

10. Sites with only one post on the main page or dozens can be frustrating for visitors. If you have too many posts the site will load very slowly. If you only have one post your visitor might not click through to the next page to see what other fabulous posts you’ve written. New posts should probably be on your main page for a day or two, so gauge how many posts to include on the front page by how many you normally write on the average day. I think five to ten posts is probably a good amount to have on the main index page.

11. Using slang in your posts can be fun or even funny sometimes, but don’t over do it. It can make your posts harder to read and even understand, and if you are creating blog posts for advertisers they probably want you to use proper words. On that note, if you are writing a post in English don’t mix your native language into the post. It just makes it harder for English readers to follow and understand.

12. It’s also a good idea to spell and grammar check your posts before publishing. Most browsers have plugins or extensions that can be added to help you check spelling and grammar as you type.

Practicing some or all of these tips should keep your visitors happy and you might even start to see an increase in your traffic. Remember an increase in the quality of your site and in your traffic could enhance your ability to monetize your blog.

Good Luck!

Unhealthy emmissions from laser printers

by Tricia

Did you hear the recent news that printers, particularly laser printers, might be putting out small particulates into the air making office environments potentially unhealthy?

Here’s some quotes from an article in the Globe and Mail on this subject:

A new study of office laser printers by Australian researchers suggests selected toner and printer combination release emissions of small particles that are potentially harmful to respiratory health. …

To get a snapshot of printer behaviour in the office environment, the researchers measured the emissions of 62 Hewlett-Packard, Mita, Ricoh, Canon and Toshiba laser printers in an office building in Brisbane.

Specifically, the study counted the size and number of particles released by the printers and their levels of sub-micrometre particulate matter emissions – tiny, microscopic particles that are easily inhaled into the lungs.

Tim Takaro, a professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University, said the study raises questions about the specific types of particles being emitted and what chemicals they contain.

“We don’t know exactly what [those particles] are, but they almost certainly contain some carbon black – most inks do – and that’s a respiratory irritant,” Prof. Takaro said in an interview yesterday.

“My concern would be mainly for people who have pre-existing respiratory conditions,” he said.

Particle counters were mounted above each of the printers in the study to assess their local emissions contribution.

The researchers concluded that the recorded levels of printers’ general emissions were high enough to significantly affect the level of local emissions in an office – and by extension, the air quality in their local vicinity.

The article went on to state that more than a quarter of the printers studied were high emitters. many of the printers tested that came up with high emissions were Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba models, but those were also the brands that had the majority of printers being tested.

A spokesperson for HP has stated that the company will be going over the study and that HP has engineered its printers to meet strict international health and safety standards.

The news story that I watched regarding this issue stated that it’s unclear how long the printers who tested high were putting out high emissions. It could just be that they have higher emissions when certain types of ink cartridges or toner cartridges are used or when these ink cartridges are new and full. Certainly more study is needed on this subject.

For now I’d say – don’t stand around the printer talking with your co-workers!

Make sure your site is easy to navigate

by Tricia

I run a number of blogrolls and as I visit the sites that have requested that they be added to my various blogrolls – the do follow list, Green Thumb Sunday, I am Canadian Blogroll and the Toronto Bloggers blogroll just to name a few – I get a chance to examine the design and structure of a lot of blogs.

I must say, I get most frustrated when I’m looking at some of the sites that want to join the do follow blogroll because of course I have to check to see if their comments follow or not.

Here are a few things that make my job of checking sites a little more difficult:

A lot of links or ads where the comment link is located:

It’s very hard to find the comment link when it’s buried within a number of links requesting that visitors social bookmark the post.

If people can’t find the link to leave you a comment it’s no wonder that you have very few comments. Just think if the comment link was at the top of the post, or on it’s own line below the post how many more comments you’d get?

People that have their comments closed to registered members:

Well for one – if you want to be on the do follow blogroll you need to open your comments up so that your visitors can get a link that follows when they leave a comment.

A lot of people just wont sign up to leave a comment. Believe me, you’ll get a lot more comments if they are open to all.

Sites that have a few or several posts on the main page but no way of traveling through the site to see older posts:

Get some navigation on your site! If I like your site or if I’m searching for elusive comments so that I can clear your site for the do follow blogroll I want to be able to travel through your site easily.

If you have archives set up by date your visitors will have to click on a number of links just to read a few posts if you don’t post multiple times each day.

Give me a way to get to the single post page:

Some sites are set up so that you can click the title of the blog post and that will take you to the single page for that post where you can comment on the post. That’s great. I love sites that are set up that way.

My problem is with sites where you can only get into the post to leave a comment by clicking on the permanent link, if you can find it see my first point, or comment link.

On blogger sites sometimes clicking on the comment link takes you to the blogger comment form. I don’t always want that. It’s much nicer to read comments on your blog than on the blogger comment page. Especially if the comment form is a pop up that’s too small to show the whole comment. I’ve run into several of those lately and you can’t adjust the size so you can’t read the full comment.

My suggestion to all is for you to take a look at a few other blogs and compare the features on other blogs to the features on your own.

Is your site easy to navigate in a number of ways?

Are important things such as the ability to get to the comment area clearly visible so that your visitors can find them quickly and easily in order to tell you how much they love your post?

If your site doesn’t have some of the features that I’ve mentioned and you want them, but don’t know how to add them on your own do a Google search with the name of your blogging platform in the search term as well as what you want to learn how to do.

for example:

add navigation links to blogger blog?

I actually just used that search term and it brought up a lot of helpful results.

I believe that the easier your site is to navigate the longer a visitor might stay and the more likely it will be that they will take the time to leave a comment if your content is good. Test my theory, try it for yourself.

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