7 Ways To Improve Your Blog Design

It’s no secret that design plays an important role in determining how your visitors will view you and your blog.

A sloppy, poorly-organized blog will convey to your visitors that you’re either an amateur or that your blog is very low-budget.

Either way, this is a bad signal to send to visitors who are seeing your blog for the first time.

For these reasons and others, it is important that you work to improve the design of your blog.

With how advanced website creation builders have come, there’s no excuse not to have a professional looking web presence online.

And besides, web surfers have come to expect professional websites.

Most people will not take the time to browse through a website that looks like a 3^rd grader built it, no matter how good the content is.

If your website looks like it was built in the 90s, they also will not bother and will click through to the next site.

The good news is that you don’t have to create some complicated blog that overwhelms your site visitors.

You simply need a well laid out design that makes it easy for your audience to navigate and find the information they’re looking for.

I’ve provided seven tips that you can implement immediately to help you improve your blog design.

Let’s get into it…

1)) Choose Your Theme Wisely

If you use WordPress or another popular blogging platform, then you will have access to hundreds or possibly thousands of different blog templates.

Instead of picking any old theme, spend some time to find one that matches your niche and looks clean and professional.

If you want a free template for WordPress or another popular blogging platform, you can simply scour Google results for “free WordPress themes.”

If you have a budget, I suggest that you invest in a paid theme, because they tend to be of higher-quality.

Good themes typically cost anywhere from around $50 and up, which in the grand scheme of things is not a lot of money, when you consider that a dinner for two could run you at least $100.

The theme could make you money, but the dinner cost you money.

I’m just giving you a different way to look at how you allocate your finances to get the tools you need for your business.

2)) Customize Your Theme

Now that you have selected a WordPress theme, it is time to customize it and put it to work for you.

If you’re using WordPress or another popular blogging platform, you will be able to make the majority of these changes through the administrative panel.

This might include things like re-arranging your sidebar or adding widgets that track traffic statistics.

In addition to this, you can make other changes. For instance, you can limit the amount of posts that will be displayed on your home page; or alter how the comments will appear on your blog.

The WordPress platform is great for beginners, intermediates, and advanced users alike.

3)) Customize the Icons

Many blog themes will come with a set of their own icons. However, it’s still possible that you can still improve the situation by finding better or less-used icons, so that they stand out more.

Believe you me, there’s no shortage of plugins, tools, and other blog resources that allows you to completely customize your blog.

To find icons, simply use your favorite search engine to find lists of downloadable icons for bloggers.

Note: If you’re not comfortable coding in CSS or PHP, you may want to omit this step, as it will be quite difficult; and may only provide small design gains.

Keep in mind, that you could always outsource any customization.

I would advise against wasting your time trying to become a programmer and to focus your goals of building a profitable blog.

4)) Be Social

If you make it hard for people to promote you, then fewer will do it. And if you make it easy for people to promote you, then more people will spread the word.

This is precisely why it is important to incorporate social media into your blog. If you make it very easy for people to take content on your blog and refer to it in tweets and on social media platforms such as Facebook, then people will do it more frequently.

For this reason, you should be mindful when placing your social media icons on your blog.

Make sure it is easy for people to access them immediately after reading a post, so that they can quickly tweet about you or reference your post on social sites.

5)) Keep Your Sidebar Tidy

Many bloggers mistakenly fill their sidebars with all sorts of junk, including widgets, tag clouds, and other items.

What they do not realize is that the sidebar is the gateway to extra income, repeat visits, and increased pageviews.

Thus, if it is poorly constructed, then there is profit to be had in improving it.

6)) Use a Blog Post Image

This may depend on your theme, but in general, using an image to accompany your blog posts is an excellent way to improve the visual appearance of your site.

I recommend signing up for a monthly plan on a graphic design platform, so that you’ll have access to all the stock images you’ll need for your blog.

Otherwise, you’ll spend a fortune purchasing images individually.

Just remember to make sure that the photographs are legal to use and will match well with your posts.

If you find that this process is getting tiresome over time, consider only doing it for important blog posts.

In fact, this could even act as a means of signaling when a post is important.

If your blog eventually becomes very profitable, you may even consider hiring a freelancer to create graphics, charts, or cartoons that accompany your entries and are exclusively for your blog.

7)) Take Advantage of Your Footer

In the past, the “footer” portion of blogs was often underused or left entirely unused. Today, things are changing rapidly in this area.

It is common to find a number of different items in the footer now, including a “latest posts” section or a “popular posts” section.

Additionally, people have begun using footers to add contact forms, so that visitors can easily send emails or submit feedback.

It has also become common to add your subscription form to this area , so that anyone can subscribe to your email list from any page of your blog.

So, next time you logon to your administrative panel, consider re-vamping your footer (via widgets) to take advantage of this otherwise wasted space.

I caution you to not go overboard by creating a clutter of a mess in the footer area.

Conclusion

Blog design is often overlooked as a secondary consideration.

In reality, however, it plays an important role in determining who stays on your blog, what they do when they’re on your blog, and who and how many people they refer to your corner of the web.

If you take time to make even small design improvements, you will reap benefits for the remainder of the blog’s life.

Your site visitors want a good experience when they land on your blog, so do your best to provide it to them.