Blog Design: Keep it Clutter Free and User Friendly

According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report in 2007, there are 120,000 blogs being created every day. How can you possibly make your blog stand out in a sea of new and established blogs? Compelling content, certainly, but what about your blog design? Will new readers dismiss your blog out-right if your blog design isn’t appealing or usable? If they dismiss you, how will they know your content is compelling? Let’s face it: like it or lump it, looks matter. Even in the blogosphere.
So how do you make your blog design stand out? Make it clutter-free and user-friendly.
When a reader visits your blog, she’s looking for something. That “something” could be entertainment, education, or community. She may have found you via a search or via someone else’s bog. The point is, she’s here now, how will you entice her to stay?
For starters, make sure your blog has plenty of white space (the space that surrounds your graphics, text, and paragraphs). White space helps lead the eye and compartmentalize each part of your blog. For example, your side bar(s) should have some white space between them and the main column of text. You may even want to include white space around each section of your sidebar (e.g., Categories and Archives in a chunk, then white space, then contact information, then white space, then outbound links or buttons). By breaking up the flow of information, you are showing your reader that each section is separate. This “chunking” also helps your reader quickly find what she is looking for.
In addition to chunking your page elements, make sure each paragraph has white space between them. Using headers above sections will also help break up the page.
Clear your sidebars. There is certain information you really need to have in your sidebars simply for ease of navigation, but many times blogs clutter sidebars with badges and links that are less important to readers. Sidebars should include links to

• Search. Believe it or not, people are reading what you’ve written. Sometimes they’d like to find a specific post they remember. Or they know you’ve written about a certain topic and they’d like to link to that post. How will they find it if not via search? You can also use links to your archives, but I think a search is more useful for your readers. They may not be able to remember the exact time when they read a certain post. If they can search for a few key words rather than digging through your archives randomly, they’ll thank you by coming back.
• Contact information. Yes, they could leave you a comment, but sometimes a reader or friend would like to contact you personally (perhaps with an issue that is best left off the comment page). If you are hoping to work with marketers and PR reps at all, they will need a clear way to contact you.
• Simple navigation. Look at your stats to determine what your readers are doing at your site. What are they searching for? Which posts are receiving the most traffic? Linking directly to a page with your most popular posts, advertising information, etc. makes it easy for your reader to use your site. Readers appreciate simple and apparent navigation.
• Links to categories. I find this useful when reading an interesting blog or looking for specific information. Providing clear categories for your reader allows her to read several articles on the same topic without having to comb through archives to find related posts.

Finally, your blog is an expression of you, but, like all good media it should be user-friendly. Two simple things you can include in your design are ensuring the font is large enough for visitors to easily read and links are clearly recognizable. Links are generally automatically underlined, but some designers dislike the underline. If you don’t want underlined links as part of your look and feel, at least use a link color that will make the link stand out, but which also flows with your design.
More articles on designing an attractive and user-friendly blog:
Tracey Grady discusses the Fundamentals of good design: Colour schemes:

The importance of colour in design can never be overstated. Colour choices influence mood, emotion and tone; a carefully chosen colour scheme can clearly express a specific design style.

Karla at Looking Towards Heaven wrote a guest post Blogging Basics 101 about Basic Blog Design Principles. She discusses and provides examples of

• the rule of threes
• color balance
• readable fonts
• keeping your sidebar tidy
• well-done blog banners

Lorelle VanFossen cautions bloggers against too much blog clutter in Blog Clutter: WTF Is That Doing There?

A visitor stumbling upon your blog is honestly looking for only two things: an answer to their search and any excuse to dismiss your site for not having the answer to their search. If the blog’s design, structure, layout, and content doesn’t give them the correct answer, you’ve given them just cause to bounce away fast.

This post was cross-posted at BlogHer.com.

Source - http://www.bloggingbasics101.com/2008/12/blog-design-keep-it-clutter-free-and-user-friendly/