Marketing Manner

Nowadays, everyone and almost every company has a blog. And blogs like this one are a great way to reach out to others and make contacts with people whose interests are the same as ours. Because you don’t have to know HTML and other codes to create a blog, anyone is capable of having a blog. But, just because there’s no coding doesn’t mean you can’t have a beautifully designed blog. Take a look at the following tips and use whichever ones will enhance your blog. The nice thing with blog design is that you can test out your changes and make more changes later without much work. There’s no reason to not try to design your best blog.

1. Easy navigation for reader usability. The best designed blogs are those that are easy to get around. The headings are in the same font each time, the menus are in the same spot on each page and it’s easy to get from one page to another.

Think about what a reader would like to do at your blog. Check out photos, check for your latest posts, check for related posts to the one they’ve just read? Give users whatever they want at their fingertips – make navigation easy. If people get confused trying to get to a post, more likely than not they’ll just leave your blog altogether.

2. Use lots of white space. A crowded page is just confusing. No one wants to read a post with tons of other text surrounding it. They also don’t want to be distracted by photos that have nothing to do with the post. Photos are a great, and I would say, necessary addition to blogs, but the photos should be in the same position(s) in each post for uniformity and design aesthetics. White space helps your blog look clean and polished as well.

3. Don’t use too much advertising within the posts. Yes, you want to make money, but you won’t make much money if readers leave because of annoying ads in the middle of your posts. Put ads down the sides of the blog and leave the center for your most important content – your thoughts!

4. Use colors judiciously. I was going to say “sparingly,” but decided against it because colors can make a boring blog look fun. I don’t think you should only use a white background with one or two spot colors, but limiting your color palette to between two and four colors will help with the uniformity of the design. It’s fine to have a purple background with white boxes of black text, if that’s the feeling you’re going for. Don’t forget that colors affect people’s psyches – red can make people feel more aggressive and black can make people feel melancholy. Pick colors that give off the feeling you wants visitors to experience when visiting your blog.

If you’ve got a Web site for your business, or even a personal Web site, it’s easy to think that a blog will be no problem to build – you’ll just copy your Web site. But that’s not the best way to go. With pro bloggers out there, you’ll need to design your blog to stand out in the millions of blogs that make up the blogosphere. Here are some hints that will help your blog get and keep readers:

Do’s

1. Keep it simple. Doesn’t this seem to be repeated in every design article you read? That’s because it’s the first rule of design and it works. The best blogs have two or three column layout, with all the ads and other info, like blog rolls, on one side of the page. No ads or extraneous stuff in the middle of the posts. Keep everything streamlined and your blog will be pleasing to the eye.

2. Position posts high on the page. If people have to scroll down to see your first post, you’re toast. Most people will lose interest if they don’t see a headline and the start of a post right when the page loads. 

3. Tweak your template. If you’ve got a WordPress or Blogger or one of many other blogging template sites, you need to change up your colors, your top image, something! Make it different so that it’s memorable. So many blogs look the same that it can be hard to remember whose blog said what.

Don’ts

1. Don’t let your page load slowly. Stay away from widgets or videos that download slowly. People have short attention spans, especially on the Web, and they won’t wait for your page to load before moving on. Keep your blog free from unnecessary items that just look cool – any downloaded items should have some kind of function that every visitor needs.

2. Don’t make navigation hard. Blogs should be scannable. People will scan the headlines, scan the blog roll and scan your posts for the info they’re interested in. If a reader is looking for archives or to read your About page, they’ll give up pretty quickly if they can’t find it easily. Put navigation links where people expect them – across the top or down one of the sides of the page. Remember, simplicity is the first rule of good blog design. You can always jazz up your background or the links themselves.

3. Don’t make it hard to see and post comments. That’s the whole reason for a blog – to encourage communication and conversation. If you bury the comments feature, no one will bother to comment and you won’t meet your blog’s purpose. Whether yours is a business or personal blog, comments are the lifeblood of a blog so design your comments not as an afterthought, but as one of the major design focuses.

I hate to admit it, but it takes me a while to try new things online. Twitter’s been mainstream for about a year and a half now, and I just joined last month. I guess you could say I like to wait until new technology has been test-driven before I try it. I just got a Prius, and I’ve wanted one for a few years now, but I wanted to wait until Toyota worked out all the bugs in it. I don’t want to get into an accident due to something that wasn’t known until my accident! Yes, I know that’s a bit overdramatic for social networking sites like Twitter, but I stand by my analogy.  

I say Twitter’s been “mainstream” because it actually started as a research project by San Francisco start-up Obvious in 2006. It was first used only by employees to communicate with each other. In April 2007, Obvious spun off what would become “Twitter.” Anyhoo, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that lets users read other people’s updates on what they’re doing or what they’re thinking, in real time. These updates are known as tweets, and they’re short messages of up to 140 characters.

Micro-blogging differs from traditional blogging due to the limited space of 140 characters. Micro-blogs can include short messages about personal matters, commentary to another person, how someone is feeling or it can just be a link dump. Here are three more just like Twitter.

Pownce
Another social networking and micro-blogging site is Pownce. Twitter is by far the most popular micro-blogging site, but Pownce has its fair share of users. The difference is that Pownce is centered around sharing messages, files, events and links with people you already know. This site debuted in January 2008.

Pownce has been called “Twitter on steroids,” and employees like it over Twitter because it has discussion-tracking capabilities. Pownce was started by Digg.com founder Kevin Rose along with three other developers.

Plurk
Another site you might want to check out if you don’t care for Twitter is Plurk.com. It references itself as a “social journal for your life.” Instead of tweets, your updates are called plurks, and are limited to 140 characters, which is the max for micro-blogging.

Plurk is still a newbie compared to Twitter; it launched in May 2008. That means I’m going to wait to check it out and let others be the guinea pigs. The nice thing about Plurk is that you can share video, images and other media.

Spoink
Spoink is another competitor, founded in 2007. Spoink’s big feature is enabling users to podcast by phone from anywhere as well as post photos, video, audio and text. You stay in touch with people through podcasts, really, more so than text.

First, email was too much. Too much info, too much time. Then we used MySpace and Facebook to keep in touch with our social networks. Now, even those have gotten to be too much. Who has time to create personal, long blogs to let her social circle know what’s going on? IM-ing is too time-consuming because you have to interact with everyone individually. Entering stage right: Microblogging! 

Microblogging is like IM, but instead of messaging just one person, you message everyone in your social network at one time. Twitter and Plurk are two popular microblogging sites, in case you think you’ve never heard of microblogging. You’ve probably heard of one of these sites, right? 

Microblogging is a way to let your friends know what you’re doing at all times. It’s kind of like the “status” feature on MySpace. Using Twitter, for instance, allows you to let everyone in your social network know what you are up to in that precise moment. Right now, in my Twitter profile I’ve got “Working on a blog, laundry is going, dog is snoring under my chair.” Fascinating, I’m sure. But, isn’t “What are you doing?” the first thing we ask when we call up a friend? And the answer we give is basically what goes into Twitter and other personal microblogging sites. But more and more microblogging sites are cropping up that are getting more business than personal. 

Yammer is a site that answers the question “What are you working on?” for those in the corporate world. The nice thing is that you can screen those outside of your company so that only your co-workers know what you’re working on. So why would Yammer and other microblogging sites be useful to the corporate world? 

People are starting to ignore their email.  People’s inboxes are filling up at a much faster rate nowadays, so much so that many emails are ignored for days at a time. With microblogging, you often don’t have enough room to be longwinded, so you can let people know what you’re doing in a sentence or two. If you’re working on a project with a boss that likes to call every half hour to get an update, you can just microblog your status. This also helps to deflect any annoying “check-in” phone calls that turn into “By the way, can you also do this or add this?” 

It’s easier to store info. Many companies trap their knowledge in PowerPoints or in one top dog’s email that gets deleted after said top dog leaves the company. Companies are starting to upload content onto company Wikis, which can then be linked to and indexed by conversational microblogs. Now it’s getting useful, and we can’t have that! Something that was intended for fun being business-oriented!? The horror! 

Managers can see who their “connectors” are. The connectors are the people who control the flow of info through the department or company. If the managers see that there are only one or two people that are distributing info, they can add other connectors, or narrow down who is diluting or screwing up company messages.