subject: Tips for Designing Your Blog for Maximum Benefits [print this page] Tips for Designing Your Blog for Maximum Benefits
The design of your blog is essential, because in the end it is the first impression that matters. The target of this article is to inform you of the range of constituents of your blog's design, in order for your blog to not just stand out from the rest, but furthermore expresses the message you wish to express to your intended audience.
Above all, it is imperative for your blog to have competent navigation. Period. Readers shouldn't be forced to explore the entire blog just to get to where they want to. To say it in another manner, it should be simple to traverse through every portion of your blog without any mystification. You can't make the users "think" when it comes to helping them go through your blog. Whatever you decide you'd like them to navigate through whether it is via tags or categories or any other method, the blog's routing plays a vital role. So when developing your blog, this is one of the vital ingredients to keep in mind. Furthermore, it's a wise idea to design some helpful secondary navigation where the widespread or associated blog posts are shown. When you make it simple for the readers to come across specific kinds of posts, they will be elated because in a way, you helped them come upon new matter.
It's also important to have a plan of monetization in place as far as the design goes. Determine ahead of time how you're going to monetize your blog. Some bloggers put up ads here and there without planning it out but you should go the other way and preconceive how your blog will look with ads, as well as what kinds of ads you plan to run.
You could run banner ads or use Google AdSense. No matter what you choose, think of how you can incorporate the ads into your design. This way, your blog will turn out to be much more enjoyable, which will lead to a better conversion rate.
Last but not the least; start to focus on the 'discussion' part of your blog right from the start. The most important sign that your blog is doing well is having an active community of commenters. When you first start designing your blog, imagine how these discussions will flow and how you can encourage them.
You should have an unique comment form design that is attractive and suits the overall theme of your blog. Focusing on the discussions from the start will help you develop a strong community. In a nutshell, form the aforementioned article it becomes palpable that in order to get all that you can from your blog, it's imperative for you to pay your attention toward building a design that is memorable, delightful and makes it show up among the crowd.
