Look as Good as You Sound

When I browse, the first thing above all else that determines whether or not I move on or linger is design. Don’t get me wrong, at the end of the day content is more important, but just as in the physical world appearance is a major attention grabber. Making sure your blog’s design is an asset and not a hindrance can greatly improve your chances of bringing in new readers.

Making a Good First Impression

The first two seconds of a page load should speak novels about the quality of your work. A design doesn’t need to be an artistic masterpiece, but it needs to either be noticed for it’s beauty or not noticed at all. It’s better to be unphased after the initial impression than to immediately feel like you have been somehow deported to someone’s mid-90’s Geocities masterpiece.

Disregarding the normal glitz and glamor approach found on many designer blogs, the easiest thing to do is re-align. A popular topic that comes up every now and then, re-aligning basically comes down to making sure everything fits into nice, level chunks. If you must, there’s quite a bit of buzz about grid layouts that you can look into. Frankly I always assumed it was an implied technique, but apparently everyone is touting it as a new era of design.

Another factor that deters readers interest is typography. Often overlooked, but easily noticeably when bad, the wrong combination of typefaces and sizes can really hurt a blog. Everyone talks about crafting great headlines, which is important, but making sure these titles you’ve pined over are readable is just as important. For finding the right typefaces I highly recommend Typetester. Aside from allowing you to preview various setups side by side, Typetester also gives you the option of copying the CSS for quick implementation.

Color schemes. What’s a post on design without mention of color theory. I’ll spare you the details, suffice to say that some things just don’t go together. Yellow on white? Next. There are quite a few tools out there, but currently my heart belongs to Adobe’s Kuler. Be warned though, not everything looks the same on a small font as it does in a large box so be sure to test things out. I recommend trying to find color codes that are easy to remember, but that isn’t always necessary.