How’s Your Blog Looking?

Today I’m sharing top tips for improving your blog’s appearance, as shared by bloggers in my Blog Lowdown series…

How's Your Blog Looking? 10 Top Tips to Improve Your Blog's Appearance

 

1. Make sure you can read everything at a glance – if your header or content font, size or colour choices isn’t easily readable then people won’t hang around to read it. (Mama Geek)

2. Categorise, categorise, categorise! Make your blog easy to navigate by categorising and using drop down menus. (Life With Munchers)

3. Don’t alienate readers. Check Google Analytics to see what browsers and devices people read your blog on and make sure it works on those that are the most popular. (Life With Munchers)

4. Make sure your social buttons are easy to find on your blog. Also customize your Twitter share button on your posts in order that your Twitter name/handle is automatically included. Tarana at Sand in My Toes has a great post explaining how to do this. (Over There to Here)

5. Make it super easy to navigate – I’ve actually visited blogs recently where I’ve struggled to find any posts past the few displayed as part of their home page. Readers need to be able to find what they want, quickly. A clearly visible search box helps with this too. (Mama Geek)

6. Include large and interesting images in your blog posts – or even graphics – particularly if you want your post to be shared in social media and encourage interaction. (Wild About Here)

7. Make use of plugins and built in functions to make your life easier so you can concentrate on creating great content. For example, instead of having a menu item linking to a page of manually updated lists of posts, link to a category page for those posts instead, or use a plugin to display the list for you. (Mama Geek)

8. Take as many photos as possible on a daily basis as you never know when you’ll need them for a blog post. (My Monkeys Don’t Sit Still)

9. When you are using images, consider the size… Full width images can occasionally take longer to load, but are much more effective. Small images do not have the same impact, and can actually be difficult to make out at all, especially if it’s a collage… It may be my advancing age (!) but it’s worth a preview before you hit publish, and choosing ‘large’ instead of a 300×300 box. (Mum Turned Mom)

10. If you can afford to, invest in a good camera. A lot of my posts are quite photo heavy, and taking a good picture is important to me. I have had a lot of comments on pictures, and it seems that readers enjoy them. Not only that, they add life to your reviews, and they can also capture some priceless family memories much better than words can. (Family Fever)

I love all of these tips, and have checked on all of them for my own blog! I do think it’s easy to get caught up in the writing (which is pretty important!) and not notice that it’s not all that reader-friendly. Hopefully, these tips will help, and I’d echo the photography comments, too. That’s why I ran my photography basics series, as it really helped me to improve my posts and I now enjoy photography, too!

To read the full interviews with any of the bloggers mentioned, simply search for them in my side bar and their full Blog Lowdown post will come up for you.

What tips would you add?

Other posts you may like…
10 Tips for Participating in Blog Linkies
10 Top Social Media Tips From Bloggers
My Top 20 Tips for Bloggers
How to Write a Brilliant ‘About Me’ Page
Top 10 Tips on Writing Blog Posts

 

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25 thoughts on “How’s Your Blog Looking?”

  1. All excellent tips, but I would also add one other critical one: making it easy for readers to follow/subscribe.

    I’ve come across a lot of blogs I’ve wanted to follow where there are no subscribe buttons, whether it’s RSS, email, WordPress, Bloglovin or other means. If I can’t find a button quickly, odds are I won’t follow, so have follow buttons and ensure they’re displayed prominently near the top of both your home page and individual post pages.

  2. Lots of great tips, Jocelyn. I have no idea how you do it all! You are so organised it blows me away every time I read one of your posts about blogging. One extra thing I think is important: make it easy to subscribe to posts. I like to follow people by email and about 1/3 of the time, the option is not even there. ‘Normal’ people (haha by that I mean non-bloggers) probably do not use bloglovin or Google+!

  3. Great tips. I’m new to blogging and picked the medium size (on Blogger) for this Otis but now in thinking I should have gone ‘large’. Might have a play with that (guessing I need to delete and re-insert photos now from the originals as I presume if it has now saved the smaller version, hitting ‘large’ will just enlarge giving poorer quality?). Also need to sort out an RSS feed for mine as I know I like to follow other people’s blogs via Bloglovin.

    1. Pictures not ‘this Otis’!! Sorry, am posting from my phone.

      That also brings me to another point though relating to how blogs look is for bloggers to check how it looks in mobile view as well as web view. I don’t know about other but normally read blogs on either my phone or tablet as I can just dip in and read a few whenever 🙂

  4. Pingback: My 20 Top Tips For Bloggers

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