Effective Blog Design Tips for Making Your Blog Stand Out from the Rest
It takes only a few seconds for visitors to decide whether to continue on a site or to click and shift to another one. Your site must boast of an attractive design that would make your readers get a fabulous first impression. If you are thinking of gripping the attention of your visitors for a longer period and if you really want them to go through your content, you must focus on creating a site that is able to leave a profound impact on viewers’ mind.
Here are some useful tips for improving your blog’s UX so that the visitors do not go away in fleeting moments; instead they stay back to read and even share your content.
Make It Effortless
The visitors to your blog should be able to browse it without putting any special efforts. Content must always be structured intuitively. You must try and understand them and anticipate what they actually are looking for. You should not leave it to the visitors to figure out how exactly your site is arranged. You must take it upon yourself to make things easy, intuitive, and simple for your readers. Your site should be optimized for their benefit.
Make It Fast
You simply cannot afford to make your potential customers wait endlessly for your site to load. You need to pep up site performance. Your website should be loading quickly if you wish to impress your potential clients. Your visitors are not in the habit of waiting for web pages to go on loading. Studies reveal that delays of even two seconds could adversely affect user experience.
The question is how to design a blog that attracts readers? Here are a few effective blog design tips for you.
Generate Memorable & Evergreen Content
While writing blog posts, you must keep in mind that you need to generate evergreen content. You must write in such a manner that they would stay relevant even years later.
You could generate evergreen content by deliberately eliminating statistics and date-specific facts. Also, inculcate a style of writing that would make the post appear fascinating and factually correct even in the future. You could add new information to your old post to make it even more interesting and relevant. Add a few new insights wherever necessary. It is like serving the old wine in a new bottle. Browse your archives from time to time to find something that is interesting enough to be updated.
Flaunt Your Best Content
If you find that some of your pages are a major hit and there is a lot of traffic to those pages, it could mean that your users are finding the content interesting and useful. In such situation, make those pages easily accessible to your readers. You could consider advertising that content well. Retain the interest of a new visitor by providing him links to those popular posts as they too would be fascinated by them. Promote your super hit posts on all your pages.
Generate Attractive Content
How to attract the user attention? The content must necessarily include well-defined headings, as well as, subheadings along with screenshots. Organize all your content properly. Do not include never-ending blocks of text. Content should always be divided into small organized and coherent paragraphs loaded with information.
Divide your blog posts into distinctive sections. Use informative, simple, and apt headings. Add a picture that would make the post more attractive but it should be relevant to the topic. Infuse some illuminating graphics like graphs, charts, and diagrams for supporting your text. Include a bullet list for easy readability.
Conclusion: Always Present an Uncluttered Look
Your blog should look warm, inviting and uncluttered. Too many advertisements could be burying the important information sought by the guests on your site. Whatever ads you have on your blog must actually gel quite subtly to your site. Also, keep track of the bounce rate. Suppose you get a phenomenally high bounce rates, it implies that your blog’s usability is questionable. Overhauling of the blog design is the way to go.
Author Bio: Joshua Ashton is a web design consultant currently working in a private consultancy firm in New Jersey. He is an avid blogger. In his recent post, he tells his readers how to design a blog that attracts readers.