Everyone makes mistakes; no one is perfect. It’s always good to make mistakes– as long as you learn from them. These blogging mistakes are as common as they are deadly, so if you’re making any of these blogger mistakes, be sure to fix it!
Clashing Design and Content
This is what I call “No Flow”. The “Flow” (way humans read) is left to right, top to bottom– unless something disrupts it and confuses the reader. An example would be a sidebar located on the right covered in flashing advertisements. This also means that the most important things should be placed near the top left region of the page. Make sure you go with the “Flow”!
Solutions
Unclutter and Unclash, please. Hide the time of your post. Hide it now! At least hide the seconds part. And tags– if you decide to display them– more than 5 tags is too much. That just adds unwanted clutter (and drowns the real content). Categories/subsections are a much cleaner way to arrange your content.
Properly align all your elements. Having the author, category, date, and “leave a comment” in one line isn’t very effective.
Stick to one colour scheme. Build your brand. Coordinate all the colours of your blog– there are way too many ineffective designs out there with clashing colours. Yes, red can go with blue. But having a dark blue background and content area with red headers hurts the eyes. Note: Adding yellow doesn’t help!
You can choose from a wide range of premade templates, or pick your own colour palattes from scheme sites like Color Combos, Kuler, Color Schemer, COLOUR Lovers, Genopal, Pixie… there are many other sites that offer similar features– you’ll have to choose the format you like.
Learn to enjoy and use the essence of space. White space. Any space.
Give us eye-candy. Post an image that relates to your blog post. Sometimes it can make the difference between a few more leaving visitors and a few more subscribing readers. Draw the viewer’s eyes to your post. And if they like what they read, they’re more likely to check out some of your other posts and visit again. So make sure you choose an interesting image!
Get a new look. Are the headers drowning into your other content? Do some of the elements of your design look out of place? Are you simply bored of your design? Get a new one! (Check out 111 Awesome Places for Free and Premium Templates.)
The titles are now big and blue– they have a contemporary feel and show up large and clear in most screenshots. (Which is always a great feature to have, in case you want to quote yourself on something or purchase a review from someone else!)
Loading ...