Styling Your Blog: Still an Essential Task

Posted on | October 13, 2009 | 4 Comments

In our previous posts, we’ve always tackled about optimizing your website. We’ve talked about link building, SEO, and the like. But there is one more piece that we dare not focus on. There may be people who think that blogging and website managing is just all about getting into the top rank of search engines through link building and all. But in my own point of view, one thing shouldn’t be left unattended or even paid the least of your attention. This last piece is the appearance of your blog. That’s right, the appearance of your blog is just as important as how you link your sites to others and how you build your site for higher percentage of getting into the top rank.

We bloggers all know that when you start blogging, your blog is in the default styles. And we often don’t want to use these default formatting. We want it to be reflective of what our personality is, or we want it to be somewhat characterizing what our blog is all ab

out.

We may always do what we want for the style of our blog, BUT we should also be sensitive of what our readers might be expecting. That is, we must be careful on how we style it. We should think that our readers have different likes and different preferences over the style they would want. So, to be on the safe side, we should have our style and formatting in a way that would blend in on some if not all preferences we may find in our readers.

And so, to guide you in choosing what style and formatting to use, here is a list of some tips I’ve found to be helpful enough:

ON THE COLORS

Sometimes, we may want to use our favorite color schemes on our website just to be reflective of our personality, BUT bear in mind that we should also reflect on what our blog’s subject is. While a black and red color scheme may be your favorite, you should consider of what your readers might be reading. Black and red color scheme may work perfectly of a Goth fashion site, but what if you have a leisure activities and fitness tips site? Would that scheme still be applicable, or would that scheme be completely out of place? Probably, it wouldn’t fit right? Similarly, pastel colors might perfectly fit on teenage fashion site, but would look totally terrible on a men’s apparel site. So to be safe, just say NO to bad color schemes. Choose those colors which would perfectly fit for all ages and all walks of life.

ON THE TEMPLATE

More often than not, we think of dumping the default template the moment we start a blog. And if we don’t want to create a template of our own, we hire or ask someone to do it for us. But why bother when there are tons of some free templates on the web. Then, adapt it a bit on your desired appearance. You may enhance the colors to what you’ve decided to employ and then add a unique banner logo.

ON THE FONTS

While you may want to see your handwriting be the font of your blog posts, consider again that it may not perfectly suit on your blog subject. Consider again and again what your readers might expect. So I have here a screenshot of font families and styles from www.w3.org which you might want to use on your blog. These font families and style though generic will surely help you be on the safe side.

(You can see more sample of these fonts on www.w3.org)

fontfamily

fontstyle5

But then again and again and again I’m telling you that there are TWO things, yes only two things you should always remember on styling your blog, CONSIDER THE USER EXPERIENCE AND EXPECTATION. These two are very important things so keep them in mind.

Thanks for having a time reading this one, I hope you had somewhat been reminded to update your blog appearance into a style that would be likable enough to anyone who would be visiting your site.

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Comments

4 Responses to “Styling Your Blog: Still an Essential Task”

jnewman1
October 18th, 2009 @ 3:56 am

I like this blog! It stands out from all the others in this search criteria! I know a great blog when I see it. Thanks for the great information on the subject. The web needs more blogs like this one. Thanks again, and Happy Halloween!
Tech Blog
steppinout
October 19th, 2009 @ 8:19 am

I agree with your post here. I do believe that “first impression” is still among the main reason readers will look at.
Kalvster
October 25th, 2009 @ 5:22 am

I would have to agree that readability is a big factor to what things I read.
Internet marketing services
October 29th, 2009 @ 5:55 pm

Very nice thinking…
There are so many important things which we should take care on our blogs such as colors, attractive templates, descriptive nature, stunning fonts because it is almost all about to attract traffic.
If our blog is beautiful and informative then it is not 100% sure that we would get traffic. It needs proper promotion.
Today web marketing is giving more importance to blogging, so be careful of it.