Saturday, February 25, 2012

Your Blog Design: Some Things to Keep in Mind

One of the good things about Blogger is that you don't have to know webprogramming in order to have a blog. It is very easy to customize your blog to reflect who you are. But here's the catch, your primary goal with your blog is for people to read it. So you have to balance your personal creativity with readability.


I cruise around the blogosphere reading the blogs that I follow, checking out new ones, bookmarking the ones that I like some of which will end up on one of the sidebars. Recently I've noticed a couple of things: blogs which were hard to read because of the color scheme, links which were almost invisible because of the chosen colors, having to scroll down through a lot of stuff to find what I am looking for, and so on.


Here are a few things to consider the next time you change your blog or website design.
  • A white background with black or dark letters is easier for most people to read.

  • White letters on a dark background is also not hard to read, but most people prefer having a lot of white space around what they read and you can't get that with a dark background.

  • Make sure the colors for your links are clearly visible.

  • Put the important information near the top.

  • If you like strong colors, consider using them as accents instead of background colors.



In case you didn't notice, I tweaked my layout to get my other blogs of interest up closer to the top. Now, if I could just find a better picture for my background...

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for the tips. I've long been wanting to re-design my blog, but I don't like any of the other templates Blogger offers. I might have to try to do something myself and get my husband to help put it together.

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    1. You can tweak the template settings to get it the way you want it. I just figured out how to get the posts in the middle without the youtube videos being all squished.

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  2. Yeah, something to keep in mind. Still planning on migrating mine from LJ but haven't had the time. I am, however, about to have tons of time....

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  3. Great points. I do try to keep the most important information toward the top as well as make sure the post words are clear to read.

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