Design: Make Your Blog Irresistible
Design is a crucial factor of blog popularity. It’s the factor that will make web surfers stop and take a closer look at your blog.
Elements of Blog Design
There are four main questions you need to ask about your blog design:
1. Is the design eye-catching? Your blog has only a second to make an impact. The design needs to be arresting and unique.
2. Does the design reflect the blog content? Every aspect of your blog design tells a story about your blog. Is your design cluttered or spare? What are the colors you use? What images are part of your blog’s design? Do you use modern or old-fashioned fonts? Are adverts visible above the fold?
Let’s say you visit a blog that offers advice on simplifying your life. What if the design was cluttered? Would you trust that this blog would give you good advice on simplicity? Most likely not.
3. Does the design showcase the content? The function of the design is to make it easy for the reader to get to the blog content. Does your blog design do that? Is your content buried in ads?
4. Is it usable? Good blog design lets the reader visit different parts of the blog without problems. Can readers find your top posts easily? Is it easy for them to comment on your posts, or to contact you? Usability is a key aspect of design.
Where should the navigation bar go?
Let’s take a look at one factor of usability: navigation. The first question is: where is your navigation bar? Is it at the top of the page, or in the sidebars?
In eye-track research, navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best. If readers have to search for the navigation bar, chances are that most of them won’t click on other pages. It’s important to separate two different aspects of design: design fashion and design function.
What Eye-track Research Can Tell Us
Design function is based on research of human behavior. Of special interest is research on how human beings respond to a web page with certain eye movements. One of the most important results of eye-track research is that the eyes are most often fixated on the upper left of the page, then go from left to right. Only after looking at the top portion of the page for some time do eyes explore further down the page. You can see this clearly in the diagram of priority zones below:
Eye-track research shows eleven important facts:
- Headlines draw eyes before pictures.
- People scan the first couple of words of a headline.
- People scan the left side of a list of headlines.
- Your headline must grab attention in less than 1 second.
- Navigation at the top of the page works best.
- Short paragraphs encourage reading.
- Introductory paragraphs enjoy high readership.
- Ad placement in the top and left positions works best.
- People notice ads placed close to popular content.
- People read text ads more than graphic ads.
- Multimedia works better than text for unfamiliar or conceptual information.
Key Question: What’s Most Important on Your Blog?
As eye-track research shows, whatever you put at the top and left side of your blog will perform best.
If you want content to be the most important thing, make sure it is on the left-hand side. If you want the focus to be on ads, put them at the top and left of your blog.
The key is to figure out what’s most important — what do you want readers to look at first? What’s next most important? Then place these things accordingly.
My belief is that readers want to look first at content, and if they like it, they might look at ads or look for other good posts or perhaps subscribe.
TIP: If you want your content to shine, use a theme with two columns, placing the main one on the left-hand side for your posts. You can then use right-hand column for a signup box for subscriptions, a ‘Popular Posts’ widget, as well as for ads.
Visual Clutter – and How to Avoid it
Another important question when it comes to blog design is the amount of clutter. Too often, blogs try to cram as many design elements as possible — posts, images, ads, links, widgets, more links, and so on … but this leads to an overall effect of visual overwhelm.
This is visually and mentally distracting, and the more clutter you have, the less priority you’re giving to any of the elements. Because the reader’s eye is pulled in many different directions, he or she doesn’t know where to look.
They might start by looking at a photo and headline, but before they start reading the post, they might see the ads, then your list of popular posts, then your blogroll, then your RSS button, and so on. They haven’t settled on looking at any one thing.
And they don’t have the chance to actually read a post, because they’re too distracted. Often this kind of clutter and visual distraction will lead to a reader disliking the blog and leaving.
Uncluttered blog design makes good use of a design concept called “white space”. This doesn’t literally mean the space is white in color, but that there’s empty space.
For just a few good examples of uncluttered blog design that use white space, take a look at the following blogs:
These blogs are great because they don’t feel overwhelming. Their use of white space is pleasing, and you want to look around, because it’s enjoyable to be there.
Identify your essential elements, remove the unessential ones, and add more white space to your design.
Other Types of Design
Whilst the minimalist look is still current today, there are also other types of design that work well. For example, here are more dynamic looks:
As you can see, there are many different options. The most important point is that the blog design should be in line with your brand.
Author: Leo Babauta