Sunday, September 2, 2012

How To Make Your Blog Attractive To A Wide Audience

There is an art to blog design that some people innately get, and some people just need a little guidance to understand it. While it’s impossible to please everyone all of the time, there are some basic principles you should follow when designing your blog. Following some basic rules can help you understand what makes a blog design attractive. It might take some practice, but you can do it if you are serious about learning or perfecting the art of blog design.

Structure :

People love colorful and vibrant logos, attractive designs and amazing graphics. At the same time, what they really care about is the blog’s structure. Many people would rather visit a plain HTML page a good, logical structure rather than visit an aesthetically pleasing blog that is difficult to navigate.

Make sure that your blog follows the basic principles of structure and navigation. For example, you should have main categories in a top or side navigational menu, and you should include other important elements where people can easily find them. It makes sense to have main categories, such as “articles” and “contact us,” at the top of the page. It doesn’t make sense to include a sub-niche, like “oil painting,” that is followed by a page of main categories that have nothing to do with art.

Just make sure that the blog has basic navigation. It doesn’t matter what your blog is talking about or what your design is meant to convey. A website must be like a book. It must be easy to navigate and read to keep people happy.

Whitespace :

Many amateur designers like to keep adding graphics, gradients, images and other elements throughout the blog design until everything is full. While a compact design might work with some blogs, most blogs do best with a large amount of whitespace. The average blog has about 30 to 50 percent whitespace where the posts are listed. The design is only on the top and sides of the blog.

Understand when you are doing too much. Overdoing a design makes it difficult to focus on one thing, and it can actually cause eyestrain.

Pick Attractive Colors :

Perhaps one of the scariest steps in designing a blog is picking the colors. If the colors don’t go together, then you can ruin the entire blog. It can be hard to recover from a bad color scheme, so be sure that the colors work in harmony. For example, three or four shades of blue work well together. You can also combine colors like purple and black for a good color scheme.

You should never pick colors that have a vibrating edge. For example, placing green and yellow or red and blue right next to each other without a black or white barrier is a surefire way to cause eyestrain. Just make sure the colors work perfectly together when building the blog design.

Safe or Unsafe :

Safe and unsafe design are two different philosophies that people follow within the design world. Safe blog design dictates that you choose two or three shades of the same color, make a two-column layout and a simple header with Arial font. It’s a little boring, but it looks fine and it gets the job done. If you want something simple, then this is perfect.

Unsafe plays with the rules a little. It uses more graphics, mixes different colors and breaks some of the rules to make a unique design. This philosophy is more prone to fail because going too far can create a bad design, but good designs created with this philosophy really stand out. Consider what you want your blog to convey, and you should be able to decide between these two.

Emphasize Functionality :

Blogs aren’t just made to show content. They are also made to emphasize functions like commenting, working with social networks and other social functions. Use your design to emphasize these functions to really make people appreciate your design.

Conclusion :

There are really no set rules when it comes to making a good blog, but there are basic principles that you should follow. You should make your blog easy to navigate, it should use colors that work well together and it should emphasize the different functions found on your blog. If you can do all of these things, then you should have a blog design that many people will like.

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