Blogging Sueblimely

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I have had blog design on my mind for a few days in lieu of having the time to actually design something for my impending move to Wordpress. I came up with some wild, wonderful and complicated ideas only to end up reminding myself of the KISS principle - Keep it Simple Sue. I brought myself back to earth and reverted back to more basic web design principles and the particular needs of a blog site.

These concepts apply whether you are designing a blog from scratch or trying to choose a pre-made template.

Keep it Scope Sensitive

• 1. Consider your blog’s goals and target audience, what is its purpose and focus.
• 2. A personal blog tends to have more design leeway than a business blog which often needs to follow certain professional conventions.
• 3. Consider the age and sex and interests of your audience whichcan influence the whole tone of your page with regard to color, image and layout .

Keep it Styled Simply

Reading on the web is not particularly easy on the eyes. A design take account of styling for readability .

• 4. Choose fonts, font sizes and colors that are easy on the eye. To state the obvious, a blog page contains a large amount of text and each page, be it archive or post pages, are the same. Blogs do not have the luxury of being able to use splash pages or images to catch and keep readers attention, the words are paramount.
• 5. One thing that amazes me is that as screens get larger and resolutions higher there is a tendency for smaller text. This is more noticeable in blogs that have an eye on making money online and advertising. Wanting to follow SEO recommended techniques for which elements should be in the optimizd position, they cram as much as possible into the top page area that does not require scrolling. There are some good reasons for this ‘fold’ area, in regards to how the eye scans a page, but go overboard and readability suffers. The quality of your posts is the drawcard to keep readers interest and to bring them back. Keep your content interesting and readers will happily scroll to read your posts.
• 6. Use white space to help guide the eye rather than confuse it with clutter. Space out lines and paragraphs, do not crowd them
• 7. Columns are used in newspapers and books for a purpose - to allow your eye to scan lines easily, without causing undue strain. Wide content areas do allow more of your post to be visible without scrolling, but the difficulty in reading may not keep your eyes, or your mind, focused for long.Widescreen monitors and full width flexible layouts increase the problem. You do not have to have your windows maximised of course, but having to change window size can be offputting. I personally find that having other windows, or even my desktop background showing, behind a reduced sized window is distracting. In general spend significantly less time on full width sites than others.
  On the other hand 800x 600 screens are becoming outmoded, making it less necessary to use the narrower layouts. A good stats utility will show you what resolutions your readers are using. You can use the extra area allowed by wider window sizes to add a third column to your blog rather than make your post area too wide.

Keep it Sensibly Systematic

Consider the placement of individual page elements:

• 8. Follow blogging conventions so that readers intuitively know where to find things.
• 9. Study other blogs so that you can develop a picture of this, particularly in regard to your sidebar.
  Archives, categories or tags, subscription and contact options should be easy to find. Place them in a prominent position in your sidebar. Work out what other things readers of your blog may be interested in. For example, you may have other blogs or sites that they like to visit too. Don’t make your readers hunt for these, as they are likely to give up and head off somewhere else.
• 10. A current trend is to make greater use of the footer. Ensure that long sidebar content does not make important information hard to find on individual post pages, where the footer may be well below your content. Anchor links to your footer placed near your post may be a way round this
• Take care with the proportions of site elements ensuring your content does not get lost. Look at the size of headers, sidebars and sidebar elements in relation to the overall layout.
• Ensure easy navigation around your blog pages, making everything as easy to find as possible.

Keep it Simply Stunning

Taking account of readability, blog conventions and sensible layout, your blog design concept will be now be plain but well organized. Now you can think of adding styling elements that will distinguish your blog and mark it as yours; but do not compromise your basic planning principles.

• 11. Browse showcase and blog directory sites for ideas - take screenshots or bookmark them for later reference. If you wish to discover how certain elements are styled, use a utility such as the Scrapbook extension for Firefox to do a quick download of the page or look at the sites source code.
• 12. Always remember that you are designing for a blog and unless you are aiming for a young, My Space kind readership, avoid gaudiness glitter and glare.
• Use your heading and logo to make your blog distinguishable but do not make it so large that readers need to scroll too far to reach your top post.
• 13. Keep in mind that images in posts are attractive and help break up the large amounts of text in your content area. Keeping the rest of your design clear and clean means that these images draw focus and interest to your posts. You have more freedom in post image, color and size as you don’t have to worry about clashing with surrounding images and colors.

Keep it Smartly Shaded

Consider your colors carefully taking account of:

• 14. Readability - text color should clearly stand out
• Use strong color contrast for text and text background - use darker text on light backgrounds or vice versa
• 15. Consider the preferences of your audience and what fits with your blog’s purpose.
• 16. Delineation of Page Elements - Different colored backgrounds text can divide your page up; to draw focus to areas you with to highlight. Take care that colors do not draw attention away from your content.
• 17. On centered designs keep the background color or image toned down or in harmony with your other background colors.
• 18. Gradients used carefully can jazz up a page without taking it over; the darker color in line with your heading, the lighter color with your post content.

Keep it Search Engine Savvy

• 19. Choose a site title that is relevant either to your topic or identity.
• 20. Consider which keywords to use as metatags, in your title, description, sidebar headings, navigation menus and category lists.
• 21. Add “alt” (descriptive words) to your site images.

My graphical representation

of the Googlebot

Keep it at Supersonic Speed

• 22. Only include javascripts, widgets and 3rd party coding
• elements that are absolutely necessary - Work out which social networking and subscription sites that require you to place code on your site are really of use to you and leave the rest off. Jazzy image effects may be visually appealing but can slow a page down considerably.
• 23.Take care with the amount and size of images used in your template and posts.
• 24.Use image size reducing tools to create graphics that are as small as possible in pixel size while retaining their quality. (Article to follow on this one)
• 25. Consider creating a seperate page for some slower loading elements - eg create a page for your award images. This unclutters your sidebar as well as improving page load time.

Have I taken all of these factors in consideration with the design of the blog as it is now? Not completely. This is my aim for my upcoming makeover.

Reading Resources

General:

• useit.com: Jakob Nielsen’s Website has many useful articles. I found his study on how the eye scans a page particularly interesting. F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
• Mark Boulton - covers “Design thinking, Web Delivery”
• Problog Design gives a good coverage of blog design, layout and useability.
• The Graphic Design Blog
• Pro Blogger Design Archives
• Web 2.0 How to Design Guide - gives examples of good design principles combined with the more modern look.
• Andy Budd’s Well Designed CSS Sites
• Dev Lounge Design Articles
• Showcase sites - good browsing material for ideas. Take care here, although a design may be very visually appealing it may not suit the requirements for a blog. To save me entering a long list here please look at my del.icio.us bookmarks - Sueblimely Showcase
• LogoTwo - a dedicated Web 2 Showcase of logo designs
• Search Engine Watch

Specific articles

• Five Simple Steps to designing with colour Part 1,- Part 2, - Part 3 by Mark Boulton. This site is a also a wonderful illustration of using a clean simple blog theme and colorful, graphics in posts. The graphics are not only complementary to the subject matter of the posts but give the whole page its design appeal with no distraction from the content.
• The Value Of White Space by Netmechanic. A good explanation of active and passive white space and how to use it to good effect.
• Put Your Best Foot Forward: 19 Gorgeous Website Footers
• The Right Width for Your Blog by Michael Martin from Pro Blog Design on Problogger
• How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Website
• Making a Site Link Friendly- The turn-ons and turn-offs of a design.
• 45 Excellent Blog Designs from Smashing Pumpkin Magazine.
• How C.R.A.P is Your Site Design? by Mike Rundle on Vitamin

Blog Design sueblimely alexa

Popularity: 3% [?]

It is recommended that bloggers post regularly and frequently to develop and maintain their readership. This can create a lot of pressure on blog authors, especially if the time available for blogging is limited, you have a lot of research to do or you simply do not have the quantity of ideas or material to do so.

In these sort of situations frequent regular posting can be counter productive:

• The quality of your riting may not be up to your best standard. (Not to mention the attention to detail - e.g. spelling!)
• It may be obvious that not enough research has been carried out.
• You do not allow enough time for ideas to form fully and your content reflects this. (er - now what was I going to say next)
• You are forced to neglect other aspects of blogging. (commenting, replying to your comments etc). I tend to be an offender here - sorry.
• You can start to lose interest because you are not enjoying blogging and you are less than satisfied with not satisfied with your content.
• Readership actually declines.

What do you do?

The simple answer of course is to post less frequently and concentrate on quality rather than quantity. If you now blog daily change this to every other day and so on.

If you think your frequency of posting is too low and do not want to reduce it even more, there are a few ways to keep your posting levels up while still reducing your time commitment.

• If you have the time or inspiration to create a few posts at once, do not publish them all on the same day. Publish them one at a time over a one week or two week period.
• Split longer articles into two or more posts and publish them on different days. Identify these posts by giving them common titles. I have do so in this series of posts which start with Blogging Stress. (I thankfully resisted the urge to create an acroynm as I did with my SSS posts just realizing what the letters may have been interpreted as - BS)This is also a valuable way of bringing readers back to your blog - to find out the conclusion to your post.
• Work out which of your topics or posts are the most popular and consider changing the focus of your blog to concentrate more on these. It is likely that these posts are the ones that interest you the most too and are less likely to be a chore to write.
• Don’t attempt to create a whole blogosphere in one blog. Try to make your blog unique. Do not create long posts about topics that have been covered elsewhere, unless you are bringing a new perspective to the subject.
• You may feel the need to post about everything related to your blog’s topic, to provide a comprehensive resource for your readers. You can do still do this but save time by using what is already available online.
  • Link to other posts/blogs with a short introduction rather than writing a full article yourself; adding your own points if necessary.
  • Add useful resources to a sidebar blogroll.
  • Post a reading list from time to time.

  If you are concerned about sending readers away from your blog to another site, keep in mind the value of linking and developing contacts with other blog authors.

• Don’t worry about adding graphics to your posts. They do add interest to a blog’s appearance but can take up a disproportionate amount of time. Adding graphics to some but not all posts can be as effective. I enjoy dabbling with photoshop so creating graphics is a leisure activity for me; but I only add them to a few posts.
• Conversely do add graphics in some circumstances. Jazz up a post that is short on content. Better to do this than pad it out with less useful text. Use images to explain subjects you are finding hard to describe. Don’t spend a lot of time on the images and use open source/royalty free images rather than creating your own.

I have run out of ideas now and am not going to pad this out further. I can always revisit the topic later on to add other relevant points and hopefully receive some other ideas from those that comment on the post. (Blatant hint/plea.)

To conclude.
Concentrating on quality rather than quantity of posting can save you time as well as raising the standard of your blog.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Following my article Blogged Out, Stressed Out I have been concentrating on researching the issue of Social Networking with a view to cutting back on some of the groups I am a member of. My aim is to make my social networking activities more productive as well as less time consuming.

To gain the full benefit from Social Networking sites you need to be an active participant. In general adding contacts, commenting on their blogs, favoring those you like and messaging are necessary to make your membership worthwhile. If you join multiple such sites, time constraints mean that you have to spread yourself too thinly and you cannot give each of them the attention required. Many times I find the same people are joining the same sites that I am a member of. One face may appear four times in my sidebar widgets (MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, SpicyPage, Blog Catalog). It is a good reminder for me to catch up with some of the people behind the images, but then I have to decide which is the best site to visit to contact them through.

I took a little time out to think about this and did some research on where my visitors were being referred from and which sites my main contributors belonged to. When I first registered with these sites I keenly joined up with many groups, accepted all friend requests, trying to keep up with my increasingly bulging email inbox.

I am now going to be much more selective. I will join social networking site groups/communities only after I have worked out if I share common interest with other members so that I can contribute to the group. I am now turning down requests to join groups if I don’t think them worthwhile for me or if I think the time involved means I cannot contribute. I have stopped bookmarking on multiple bookmarking only sites.

I will concentrate more on keeping in contact with current contacts, realizing that more close contacts have developed because of other close contacts rather than from the networking sites. Apart from this I feel bad about taking longer than I should to respond to these friends. For me social networking is not all about gaining readers it is a form of socializing and a way of gaining friends too.

Specifically these are sites I am going to pay the most attention to:

• For the kind of site where favoring individual posts is the main aim I am going to favor Stumbleupon.
• If a blog has a Digg button and I enjoy an article, I will continue digging. I will Digg friends who request one.
• I have become more involved with Ning lately due to the Blogging to Fame Fans site but have started refusing invitations to join other groups.
• I am considering mainly concentrating only on MyBlogLog rather than multiple such sites. I will continue following only the Bumpzee groups that are of the most interest.
• Del.icio.us is to be my favored bookmarking site.
• I will continue to use Pownce to see if that takes off among my blogging friends as it promises to be a good direct way of communicating if I don’t have direct email contact or if I want to send a message to a few contacts at once. I find it hard to keep up with a conversation if part of it takes place on Facebook, part on MyBlogLog, part by email….
• I will continue with Facebook as I also have non blogging friends and family on there.
• After success with gaining members and new friends on Blogging to Fame Fans I am going to think more about creating my own topic specific Social Networking sites.

I most definitely do not want the sites in my list above to be viewed as recommendations but as examples. Your needs and requirements are most likely to be different to mine. I do suggest that, if you are getting snowed under with your social networking activities, you do your own research. Work out which sites have been the most valuable to you personally and which may be so in the future. Take into consideration your blog topic, your most popular types of post, who your current readers are and where they are more likely to ‘hang out’. For example, are your readers young or more mature (the two are not mutually exclusive, I was referring to actual age).

Here are some posts that may help you with the decision.

• Picking Two Social Networks - Reddit and StumbleUpon - A Small Office Australia blog post whose author has declared a ‘Minimalist Month’, is dumping social networking sites and concentrating on Stumbleupon and Reddit. (Oh dear I have not paid much attention to Reddit at all, maybe I should. Maybe I should also stick to my own minimalist resolve!). The post also has links to useful pages on these two applications.

• DoshDosh has some useful hints on making the most of social networking participation - Social MediaEvangelism: How to Turn Visitors into Supporters of your Website and Are Social Bookmarking Buttons Useless. DoshDosh has many valuable articles even if it is not your aim to make money online.
• 30 Largest Bookmarking Sites - July 2007

• Four memediggers compared: Digg, Reddit, Meneame and Hugg from the Social Software Blog (now to being run by The Download Squad in their Social Software category Take care reading this blog if you are a compulsive ‘joiner’ as it will provide you with logs of sites to join!)

I could find many others but one of my resolves is not to get sidetracked by surfing too much!

If you know of any useful articles with advice on which Social Networking sites are the most useful please let me know and I will feature them in this blog - with a mention of you in thanks of course.

Hearing of your own experiences would be wonderful too.

I will be continuing this series with posts on time saving, useful tools and being organized.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Blogging is meant to be fun, right? Most of the time it is but, are you ever:

• Overwhelmed by the amount of work your blog itself creates.
• Feel stressed trying to keep up with all the social networking you feel that you have to do?
• Worried that your posts are good enough, your site is designed well enough, you are running out of ideas ….
• Concerned you are missing out on some new trend.

If you are keen to increase readership and gain recognition in the blogging world, as most of us are to some extent, there are many things we are advised to do. When you are not blogging your mind may be filled with thoughts of having to blog daily, answer comments, comment on other blogs …. and then you have to spend the time actually doing it.

With the advent of all the new social networking tools it is sometimes hard to keep up. It was simpler (although probably less effective) when the main things you had to do to get your blog noticed was to submit to blog directories and search engines, make sure your meta tag keywords were adequate and comment on other blogs.

That changed. Along came del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, Stumble upon, MySpace, Linked In, MyBlogLog ….. many many others …… Facebook, Pownce Twitter …. Mashable (who also have their own community feature) have a good list of the main ones on: The social network grid.

…. an hour later - I had not logged in to Mashable for a while - I had mail! It was my lucky day it seems:

I’m a Indian guy age 30 with fun luving character and good looking. I’m working as an Computer professional, India I’m looking for a female (married/unmarried) friend she really wants a honest, healthy and true male friendship.

If anyone is interested let me know - you are welcome to him!

Back to the topic now (after some self-talk re: concentrating). There are bookmarking sites, feed sites, profile sites, photo sites, video sites, miniblogs, seemingly pointless chatter sites and who knows what is round the corner.

All of these require your time and effort to one degree or other.. Answering friend requests, making friend requests, joining communities, sending messages, replying to messages… If you are a member of multiple such sites then the amount of time involved can become too much and counterproductive to blogging. It can get to the extent that you get behind on posting.

In my case I tend to join new things because I want to check them out for possible reviewing on here. I know others join because it may be the next big thing or their contacts have joined. This only adds to your work load.

Whether you are blogging for relaxation, to make friends, to make money or as an adjunct to a business, you need to manage your time effectively. Otherwise blogging becomes a chore.

Unfortunately some of the solutions also take time and effort but will be worth it in the long run. I will be writing a series of posts covering this topic over the next weeks. In the meantime please go and have a look at the post that motivated me to make a start on this topic, which I had been in the pipeline for quite a while: Pearl, the talented author of Fresh Perspectives talks about what to do when you have writer’s block - Make a Decision and Stick with it

Please let me know if you sometimes find blogging hard work rather than fun and if you have found ways to deal with it.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Having talked about widgets in the last couple of posts, I felt I should add a warning about how numerous widgets can really slow down your page loading time.

A useful tool for checking your site speed is the Web Page Analyzer from Website Optimization.
The script calculates:

• page size
• composition
• download time

Itt calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component.

Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I would recommend this post to those of you who are starting out blogging and are concerned about increasing traffic. John, of “Finding The Money” fame, has again come up with a well written article that pulls no punches and makes perfect sense.

The article spurred me on and I hope you find it encouraging too. I am not going to give away his tip as you need to read it in context. (I also don’t think it good betiquette to take advantage of someone else’s idea in posts but I will certainly put his advice to good use.)

If You Remember No Other Traffic Tip, Remember This One

Popularity: 1% [?]