Blogussion » archives

What Every Blogger Should Know About Design When Buying a Theme

Seth — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:00:47 +0000

Getting a new design for your blog is both time consuming and expensive. There are many great options for free themes but too often these themes do not have very many features and require a lot of extra work.

Purchasing a theme from premium theme designers or paying for a custom design can not only give you many extra features but also allow you a unique and useful user interface.

Getting a design is much more than choosing colors, uniqueness and price. There are a lot of important design elements you should know about before getting a new theme. Here are your most important areas of interest as well as a buyer’s checklist.

Fundamental Design Elements

There are a few very important things to consider when evaluating the design of a potential theme. Some of these elements are often misunderstood so I will point out the what is usually left out of posts about theme design.

We all know that features are important and themes with jquery or admin panels add extra customization to your blog theme, but lets go back to the fundamentals.

White Space

In the image above all you see is the words. The “whitespace” is exactly what the name implies.. the area around the image that is white. Now to categorize as whitespace an area in design does not have to be “white”, just clear of any text or images.

Whitespace is important in design because it focuses the eye on to what is important. A good example of how this doesn’t work is when you go to a site and the design’s background is intense with a collage and millions of colors. The text or image you are trying to highlight never even gets any attention. Here’s an example of zero whitespace:

In the bad example you can tell that the words are there and we even could accent the text with either a drop shadow, outer glow, or stroke around the text to make it more appealing. But can you see how without whitespace your eyes are too busy.

Your eyes are taking in all of the background and trying to work out the text from all the other interesting images.

If you had an entire pack of with no whitespace then very easily you could find your blog with no readers, little click-throughs, and no brand. Actually you would have a brand.. you’d be the blog everyone remembers not to go to.

Avoid any design that does not have enough whitespace around important areas like the logo, navigation menu, and content area. Trying to make your theme busy only leaves your site empty.

Eye Tracking

For the avid readers of Blogussion I apologize, this next part is a repeat idea from a post last week, Your a Blogger Not a Crackhead! Its about finding a design that highlights the things that are most important to you.

The number one thing is your logo which brands you and should include near by your navigation menu and then your conversion tools. Your conversion tools are your subscriber boxes, products, ads, etc. Whatever your goals are for your blog is what your conversion tools should be pointing too.

Let’s look at the examples of good eye tracking to remember what it is.

The Eyes #1 is the area your eyes first see on a page and the Eyes #2 is the second area your eyes then go to. Eyes#2 is the area that you are trying to get people to see. In our blog its about converting people to subscribers.

Clean Content Areas

In one of my favorite posts on Blogussion, Alex describes some of the best ways to style your content area. If you have some time you should definitely read the entire article because Alex does an amazing job at breaking it down – Stellar Tips for Styling Your Content

To highlight some of what Alex said here is one of his main points:

Headings Matter – Alex talked a lot about headings because they really do matter. They draw attention to your post and bad headings with unattractive fonts or the wrong typography (text) can quickly scare away your readers. Be sure your the headings in any blog you are looking into are clear and clean looking. They should be prominently located on the page for maximum results.

Typography

Your text is the primary instrument for gaining more traffic and keeping readers. We talked yesterday about how to write powerful content and have previously talked about the importance of good content, but now I want to talk about the typography (font design) of your text.

Typography is the intricate design of the fonts you are using on your blog. Although there are plugins to add extra font features to any wordpress blog, the original functionality of the blog theme you are using makes life a lot easier.

For example Thesis theme comes with over a dozen options for typography. Other feature rich themes do too. The key is many of the free themes don’t and unless you have the patience to setup a complicated plugin then you should look into typography early on.

For the best practices of good typography, and to learn what all of the most popular blogs are using for their sites, check out Smashing Magazine’s Typographic Design Patterns

Wrapping It Up

In the coming weeks we have more design posts planned to help you not only get the best design features on your site but also teach you what to look for.

We hope you enjoyed learning more about web design and be sure to look at some of these fantastic resources.

Very Straightforward Methods to Draw Traffic Back to Old Posts

Alex — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:26:31 +0000

As much time as it takes to write a great post on your blog and get some attention from it – it disappears. That amazing post that was so well off just moves on from the front page and goes off to page two…three….and sooner or later it is buried so far no one remembers it!

That is a major problem for all blogs, and one that is not always given much attention to. Keeping old posts alive and in the loop can really bring a lot more traffic to your blog than you think. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it can’t still bring in traffic to your blog!

There are a lot of posts here on Blogussion that are buried pages back that I would love to still have on the front page of the blog. I can’t just do that, because the newer posts on the blog wouldn’t get noticed this way. So, I came up with a few ideas of my own that can hopefully solve this issue and get older posts viewed by my readers again. Ideas that are going to be implemented here very shortly!

Numbered Page Navigation

Okay, so I included this as part of my 5 Improvements, 5 minutes post and a lot of you seemed to react the same towards it. Basically, if you look at the bottom of the homepage here on Blogussion – you will see a a numbered list of all of our pages of posts, opposed to the standard “previous” and “next post” links.

Not only is this useful for better page navigation, and some have even argued for SEO benefits – but it will make getting to older content easier. With a numbered navigation, a lot more possibilities open up as to where someone might end up reading on your blog.

The plugin I use on my blogs to display the numbered pages is called WP Page Numbers. In the comments of “5 Improvements, 5 minutes,” a reader pointed out an alternative to the plugin called WP-Pagenavi. Do you guys have any preference between the two plugins?

Keep your Popular Posts Popular

Do you list the most popular posts on your blog? If you do, then great work! If not, I advise you get a list of your popular posts up on your blog as soon as possible!

I like to have a list of the top posts on my blogs because it gives newer visitors a taste of some of my best content. If you notice in the sidebar here I have done that, and any other blog I have designed does the same.

You have to make sure your popular posts are very visible on your page. My best advice to keep them “above the fold.” In web design, “the fold” is what the user sees before they have to start scrolling down the page. Because it is so hard to impress visitors at first glance, you have to put your best content above that fold.

A popular place to show the most popular posts on blogs is in the sidebar. I keep them there, and thousands of others do too. Place them as high up in sidebar as you can so when someone visits your site, the first thing they see is your best content.

If you have banner ads high up in your sidebar, I strongly advice you push them down or remove them from your sidebar and replace them with your popular posts list. That is exactly what I did when I talked about the negative effects of banner ads on my community, and I do not regret it at all.

Try this at home: If you do have poor performing banner ads on your blog, try removing them and in place of them put your list of most popular posts. Leave it there for about a week and check to see if you see any changes in pageviews on the posts listed. I almost guarantee you that they will get viewed more.

“Stick” posts to the front page

WordPress has a new feature which I believe was released in version 2.7 called Sticky Posts. Basically, it’s an option you select in your posts panel and for whatever post you activate it for – that post will always be on top of your blog and never be pushed down the page by newer posts.

This is a truly great option as you can get a post from months back that may be extremely valuable and have it hanging out on your homepage for all of your newer visitors to check out.

I find that the sticky posts option and the teasers option in Thesis work great together. Since you can fit more posts on a single page with teasers, you can make multiple posts sticky and still keep new posts visible.

I’m not going to lie here, I actually got this idea from the marketing genius Marko Saric who uses this technique to keep his older, but extremely informative articles up top for his newer audiences to see. Don’t think it’s a smart move? This, and some other techniques contributed to Marko getting 200,000 visitors in his first year of blogging. Way to go man!

Create a list of YOUR favorite articles

Just like listing the most popular posts on your blog, a section where you pick out your favorite articles can work very well for getting older posts read.

Some of my best, most well received posts are sitting in the archives of this blog collecting dust. I hate the idea of that, so later this week (coming along with the design refresh…yes you heard it here first folks) there will be a big change to that and my older articles will get read.

If you’re unsure of what I am suggesting here, check out the homepage of ProBlogger. He picked out his favorite posts on his blog and he organized them into a little list on his blog. I’m sure those posts do very well on his blog now, and of course are buried back dozens and dozens of pages.

Quickfire tips

I always love this little section! I have already broken 1,000 words in this article and don’t want to explain each and every idea I had in full depth, so here are some more quick tips for you:

Internal Linking – I linked to a couple of my past posts in this article. If you are reading this blog for the first time, chances are you never read those articles. Hopefully with the anchor text I used to show the link, you got interested and maybe opened the link in a new tab to read right after this post!
Link to similar posts – At the end of each post, in your post footer, add a list of posts that are similar. You can do it inside your article, or you can put all of your trust into a plugin and have that generate similar posts for you.
Add a search bar – Search bars are probably more valuable then you think. All people need to do is type in a keyword, and can automatically get linked to dozens of posts with that keyword in it.
Archives page – Most bloggers have an archive page already. If your blog in particular doesn’t have one, think about adding one. When you really think about it, your archives page is really the best gateway to your older posts.
Create a sneeze page – A sneeze page is a page you create and list your favorite posts, or posts you think are very valuable. Darren Rowse explains it great as a challenge in his 31 Days to Better Blogging challenge.
We have a sneeze page if you would like to see a great example of what one might be. It’s part of our From Planning to Earning guide, and we have created our sneeze page in our blogging guide section of the guide.

Just trying to keep your blog tidy

I hope you guys enjoyed this article. What are your tips for keeping old posts in the loop? Is there anything you would add on to anything I mentioned in this post? Let me hear all about them in the comments!