Your Blog Sucks, You Should Redesign It…The Right Way

One thing that drives me crazy is the way so many of the blogs I come across on a daily basis are designed. I’m not a design or usability expert but I am an internet user, who happens to use A LOT (sounds like I have an internet addiction problem ).

Do your research people, find out what makes a good website actually good! That brings me to….

10 Principals of Effective Web Design

Smashing Magazine had a really nice post on effective web design (link above) that bloggers should really thoroughly check out before designing a website/blog to make sure they’re doing things right. I disagree with a few things there but I won’t argue with them.

Here are a few things that I try to keep in mind while doing my work:

1. Visitors scan pages, they don’t really read them through. That would just be a giant waste of time since they are usually there for something specific. How do visitors scan pages? By anchor points throughout the page. Anchor points either draw their eyes there or is relevant to what they are searching for.

That means blogs/websites need to guide visitors’ eyes through the page. It drives me crazy when I see pages that have no flow or direction.

2. Presentable eye flow (from the anchor points) gives websites or blogs a comfortable and easy feel to the page as well as making navigation and browsing easier. Good eye flow goes along with the way we read. From left to right, then down a little farther in the page, left to right again and so on. What that results in is “Z” eye flow.

It’s a good idea to setup your site to use a “Z” eye flow but if you don’t, at least guide your visitor’s eyes to where you want them to go. The easier it is for your visitors to browse your page, the longer the will likely stay.

3. Give your visitors a reason to stay, and do it fast. If you don’t give your visitor’s a reason to stay at your site pretty much right off the bat, they will leave pretty much right off the bat. I can’t even begin to count the number of websites I have seen that the article or permanent information was just spewn on the page. I only stayed long enough to see the site wasn’t going to help me accomplish my goal (maybe 5 seconds).

4. Make what you have to offer easy to use. If the majority of your site isn’t easy to use, visitors aren’t going to stay. They are going to go find a website that is easy. Blogs don’t have to work about that too much but if it’s hard for people (in any way) to subscribe to your rss, you’re loosing out on readers.

5. Make your posts easy to read. So many blogs just have a title and text….lots of text. That makes me feel like my eyes are going to explode.

Why would I read that? Break up the monotony by using bold or italics, images, smilies, etc. Bolding and italicizing important words, phrases or sentences will help visitors find what they’re looking for faster.

Keep your paragraphs shorter. Even the one above is a little long but because it’s broken up a little with different styling, it’s acceptable. Big blocks of text will be skipped right over. If the important information was there, then you just failed your visitors.

There is a lot of information on the internet on design and usability for websites, so don’t just throw something up and hope everyone is going to flock to your website to read it. I would really love to see some of the blogs I stumble across revamp their sites. I bet they would gain and retain more visitors.