For some webmasters the only important thing to consider with a blog design is that it looks nice. I can understand this from a basic point of view but creating a blog that works for users is more than just picking nice colors. This is even truer if you depend on your blog to generate sales/customers because a bad design will lose you both.
The navigation or menu is the most important part of your blog (not your flash banner) because it's how people find the section they want. Users on the net don't have a lot of patience so if your menu isn't clear or well structured they won't be hanging around to work it out.
Flash has been around for a long time and in small doses it can really brighten a blog up, i.e. a rotating banner.
However there are too many problems with blogs that are all flash. They don't work on iphones, google can't index them, you can't use the back/forward buttons in your browser. For these reasons I suggest you avoid full flash at all costs.
Overloading visitors with too much content is almost as bad as too little. So often when on a product detail page I'm assaulted with 10 pages of technical data when all I wanted was the dimensions. Clearly segment your data because customers don't have time to wade through all the information to find what they need.
It wasn't too long ago that there was only one browser you had to test your blog in but those days are long gone. It's essential you check your blog in not just the different browsers but also the different versions of them. For example ie7 can often display things very differently than ie8, the only way is to test.
Consistency is essential if you want to appear professional and there's nothing more unprofessional than standard fonts and colors which change throughout the blog. If your using Arial then stick to it otherwise I'm going to get the impression you don't know what you're doing, and I'm pretty unlikely to hand over my credit card details. I hope these tips help next time you're designing a blog.
From the perspective of Google Panda update you should keep a well organized navigation structure in your blog and must have an HTML sitemap and at least one page of the blog should be reachable from all the other pages on the blog
The navigation or menu is the most important part of your blog (not your flash banner) because it's how people find the section they want. Users on the net don't have a lot of patience so if your menu isn't clear or well structured they won't be hanging around to work it out.
Flash has been around for a long time and in small doses it can really brighten a blog up, i.e. a rotating banner.
However there are too many problems with blogs that are all flash. They don't work on iphones, google can't index them, you can't use the back/forward buttons in your browser. For these reasons I suggest you avoid full flash at all costs.
Overloading visitors with too much content is almost as bad as too little. So often when on a product detail page I'm assaulted with 10 pages of technical data when all I wanted was the dimensions. Clearly segment your data because customers don't have time to wade through all the information to find what they need.
It wasn't too long ago that there was only one browser you had to test your blog in but those days are long gone. It's essential you check your blog in not just the different browsers but also the different versions of them. For example ie7 can often display things very differently than ie8, the only way is to test.
Consistency is essential if you want to appear professional and there's nothing more unprofessional than standard fonts and colors which change throughout the blog. If your using Arial then stick to it otherwise I'm going to get the impression you don't know what you're doing, and I'm pretty unlikely to hand over my credit card details. I hope these tips help next time you're designing a blog.
From the perspective of Google Panda update you should keep a well organized navigation structure in your blog and must have an HTML sitemap and at least one page of the blog should be reachable from all the other pages on the blog
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