I took roughly 10 million pages of notes during the Blog Design session at the Type-A Parent Conference last weekend. That was partly because there were three presenters — Laurie Smithwick, Brittany Vanderlinden and Melissa Culbertson — and partly because there was a ton of great information presented.
I changed the look here a little bit not too long ago, but I’m not crazy about the changes I made. So I’ve been thinking about changing things up again, and Laurie, Brittany and Melissa left me with a lot to think about to that end.
As with the Facebook Page post, these are my mostly unedited notes. Let me know if you have any questions, and I’ll try to clarify!
Notes from “Blog Design: You Can Make It Beautiful”
Top 10 Design Mistakes
Sizing issues. Elements on the page are either too big or too small.
Lack of “sharing” buttons.
Mismatched purpose. Your design doesn’t fit your site’s goals.
Lack of images.
Clutter.
Formatting. (“The never-ending paragraph.”)
Lack of You; no personality.
Bad fonts.
Poor images.
Outdated stuff.
Under the hood
Google and other search engines only see the coding.
Make sure your content and categories show up before sidebar info, etc.
Carefully consider what you link to; every link takes readers away from your site.
Don’t use a lot of categories. Melissa suggests no more than 10. (Note: I counted my categories after the session. There were 84. Eighty. Four! I’ve been working on that.)
Make your site easy to use
Make content easy to find.
Have a “popular posts” section.
Use related posts.
Use categories as signage to help direct readers around your site.
The fewer categories you have, the greater Google thinks your authority is because you have more posts under a specific heading.
Put your post in as few categories as possible so Google doesn’t think your post is about two different things.
Create feature pages for series.
Change your CSS for your < h1 > tags; it’s important to Google’s search function.
Sharing posts
Resources/plugins: DigDig; Sharethis; Sociable.
Customize your Share settings so it includes the Title of your post, the link and your twitter handle.
Give readers a choice of places to share your post, but not too many choices.
Put a call to action at the end of each post. ie, “Follow me on Twitter,” “Like me on Facebook” or “Pin this!”
What’s in a design
“Look” your reader in the eye. The eye starts at the upper left corner of the page.
Establish a hierarchy. Make it easy for the reader to see what you want them to see first.
White space is good.
Be consistently consistent. Don’t use 15 different fonts. If your headlines are green, make sure they’re always green, etc.
Consider using webfonts. Sites like Google Webfonts and TypeKit host the fonts so you aren’t at the mercy of what’s loaded on your reader’s computer.
The presenters were kind enough to put their presentation online, and I’ve embedded it here so you can check it out. I loved that they had their contact info at the bottom of each slide.
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