Creative Themes Design

10 Simple Design Tips to Keep Your Blog Readers Happy

05/16/2010  |  Category: Blog, Creative Designs  |  262 views  |   Print This  |   Email This  | 

Content is the King! But a great website design could help you along the way to get more readers & most importantly, engage your readers. Higher engagement leads to more business in the long run!

Here are 10 Very Simple Design Tips to create or choose the WordPress Theme for your business.

1. Simplicity is the key

Readers surf through tens of blogs & websites daily. They often do not come with the intent to admire how your website design looks when their primary intent is to find out a solution to a problem at hand.

Keep design simple so that users can move through your website or blog smoothly. Design in a way that users do not have to mouse click too much to get to what they want. For example, embed images in line rather than the user having to click on them to enlarge!

2. Light background with dark font colors win

To readers surfing through tens of websites daily on their computer, comfort matters. A website design with a light background & a dark font is comfortable to the eyes as compared to a dark background & white font.

3. A logo is Important – it’s easy to remember

A picture is worth a thousand words. While a catch phrase or a Tagline helps, a logo is very important. It creates an instant impression in the readers’ mind about your business. It helps to build your brand online.

4. Inline Menus make it easy for readers to switch pages & categories

This again has to do with the fact that readers prefer to click less. Fancy menus may look great to you as a designer, but the reader prefers to see as much as they want of your site without moving a finger (or clicking a mouse).

While many WordPress designers separate out page menus from category menus, we have found that readers prefer to have one single menu. Now several of our designs have just one menu with a combination of pages & post categories.

5. Help readers find what they want quickly

Unless you are running a magazine website, where readers come to relax & reader through pages (like they usually do on personal blogs), a business website should provide readers with a solution to their problem quickly.

Affiliate Landing pages are one answer to this – pages dedicated to single product or a single solution. By the time the readers runs to the end of your article, they are ready to convert.

6. Write for readers & not for Search Engines

SEO is very important & will get you a lot of visitors from organic searches. But unless the visitors find your posts effective, they will never be true “readers”.  Always write for the reader – Copyblogger is an excellent site to help you understand effective copy writing.

If you are so intent on SEO then the easiest thing you can do is to insert an image with a very SEO friendly image name & ALT description. It goes a long way to improve your SEO.

7. Make it easy for readers to Subscribe & Connect with you

There would always be a large portion of your readers who would want to help you & share your posts & articles with other people in their social networks. Make it easy for them to share your posts, subscribe to your email updates & connect with you on various social networks.

Since Subscription to Emails is usually a part of every online business strategy, a good business theme design will make Subscription easy for website visitors.

You can also design your themes keeping in mind that the user would be using plugins. There are several of them that could save you hours of programming by simply using some of these plugins.

The most popular plugins for business themes have been:

• the Print-This-Page plugins that lets readers to print a post or a page
• Related-Posts plugins that lets readers quickly find additional posts on your website that are contextually relevant to what they are reading
• Post-Views plugins that creates a list of popular articles on your website & guides readers to some of the “pillar posts” of your blog
• Contact-Form plugins that automatically create an inline contact form for readers to send you emails

8. Use images & scripts with caution – use Minify tools to make themes load faster

An effective theme design will balance between using text & images. Though images often add “beauty” to the design, they could make the website render slowly & could also impair SEO. Moreover, images are costly since you have to buy images from the rightful owners.

Scripts are not visible to the naked eye but are always present in every website designs. They add functionality & also helps in designing styles. Much like images, scripts that are hosted outside can cause the website to slow down. A good design will either host their own scripts or will look at appropriate places, like the footer, to place scripts.

Minify tools compress scripts & stylesheets. So a 200kb javascript file could turn into a 110kb file! Similarly, CSS scripts can be minified to smaller sizes to help them load faster.

9. Place advertisements intelligently

Advertisements could be an important part of your blog income. You earn CPM revenues anytime an ad is displayed & you also earn anytime a reader click on an ad or takes some actions thereafter.

While many readers dislike ads, a creative & effective design will attempt to place ads so that they don’t interfere with the readers’ focus & yet fall in the path of “eye ball movement”. Such intelligently placed ads increased ad-click through immensely.

10. Use widgets effectively on sidebars & footer

An effective design will use Widgets in the right places. On the sidebars for sure & even on headers & footers if necessary. Widgets allow users to provide custom content to their readers. And they can change this content very easily from the Admin panels.

A good design will have sufficient information on footers as well. For example, readers often look at the footer to know who designed the website, or to find contact information for the webmaster or business owners. Many readers also look at the footer for a Sitemap – a simple tool to find everything on your website!

Designing is a combination of art, technology & usability. An effective design combines creativity, proper programming & hence makes it extremely user friendly.