I had originally wanted to title this article “Don’t Piss Off Your Readers.” It’s blunt and to the point. If you tick off your readers then you will not have an audience anymore. I’m talking about design issues and decisions that could turn away readers before they even read your content. I’ve condensed the issues into five broad categories.
Backgrounds and color schemes. Let me be honest here, if you think purple text on an orange background looks good, you need your eyes checked. Blinding your readers is not the way to gain recurrent visitors to your blog. This also includes using really big font or really small font. Elaborate backgrounds and images also increase loading times and make waiting a pain.
Looping background music. Do not inflict your music tastes on your readers. People surf the internet at weird times. They might be at work or they might be online at three in the morning. Both of those times they do not want to fumble with their speakers to turn down loud, repetitive music that you decided everyone had to hear.
There is no way to subscribe or no RSS button. People love your site and they want to receive all your updates. If they can’t find out how to do this, they get angry and your site loses a few good readers. If you are writing a blog so that people can read it, don’t you think you should make it easy for them to do exactly that?
There is no organization. If all your posts are on the same page and there is no search toolbar, you have a problem. If there is no way to search for something on your blog, it’s not worth anyone’s time. One site, theplaylist.blogspot.com, has some organization but the problem is that the whole site is the size of one column, a lot of its posts are on one page and the search toolbar, tags and archive are all the way at the bottom, at least for the most current page. The older pages actually have more than one column and are nicely organized. If only the most recent page, the page all readers will see first, could be this organized.
There is too much on the page. Havenworks.com is the prime example of what not to do. It is an independent news blog that covers every state and every political party. The problem is that there is so much on the page that people tend to get overwhelmed. The colors are bright and glaring, the pictures are tiny and there are so many links all crowded together. There is no central point that will let your eyes focus on one thing, your eyes don’t really know where to look on this site. As always, I hope these tips prove valuable to those of you considering starting a blog. I hope to make life easier for both bloggers and blog readers. If you have any questions or if you want to talk about blogging, my email is l-ocasio@neiu.edu and my blog, The Zaftig Latina Blog, is http://zaftiglatina.blogspot.com.