An effective blog design should be so as to impress your visitors, provide communication tools and navigation elements. A blog consists of some basic elements like articles, categories, comments, trackbacks and archives. Choose a blog template design to get all started. You can customize your blog templates to set up a unique identity.
Tips for Successful Blog Design
Creative Look: It is important to impress your readers with the very first look of your blog. Some effort should be given to improve the look and feel of your blog. The design and feel of the blog should be targeted to the kind of readers you want to impress or attract. Make your blog appear complex or very simple and plain depending on your prospective readers.
Blog Roll: Your visitors will definitely appreciate reference to useful information. Maintaining a blog roll can encourage many visitors to bookmark your site. You can link to other sites and members of the same community. This will help you build up a relationship with the other bloggers. Once you put up links of other members, they might even consider adding your link to their blog rolls.
Categories: You can include all the important categories on which you regularly write or further want to post blogs. Creating separate categories will allow your readers to find all the related posts under a particular category. Each categories can be presented in separate pages. You can also install a category cloud widget so that your readers find it easy to navigate from one category to the other. Cloud navigation may also be used as a reminder for writing new posts.
Comments: You can maintain an active community by allowing/ moderating your readers/visitors to comment on your posts. You can even answer your readers’ comments. This will not only increase your comment count but will also create positive vibe among your readers.
Search Engine Optimization: Your blog should be optimized for the search engines. Target those keywords that your users tend to search most. For optimization use keywords in description, meta tags and title of your blog. But it is not wise to stuff your blog and its content with keywords. There are chances that your blog might get penalized for spamming.
Recent Comments: You can install a recent comment widget on your blog. Visitors to your blog would be definitely keen to know what other readers have to say about your service/work.
Blog Search Box: Many users like navigating a site by clicking on links while some other prefers using search box to navigate your blog. So make sure to provide one to your blog or else many users would not search beyond your home page.
Using Trackbacks: Using a trackback is a good option to inform another blogger that you have mentioned his/her work in your blog. A trackback sends a notification to the other blogger that a reference to his work has been mentioned elsewhere.
Email Subscription: Every users are not accustomed to using RSS feed. For them you can provide an email subscription box. Once they subscribe for e mails, they will regularly receive updates from your blog.
Besides following the above-mentioned tips before designing your blog, what you can do is plan up a systematic blog design. You can use free templates for your blogs. But there are numerous other users who are using the same themes for their blogs. It is better to customize your blog according to your needs. For blog customization, you can contact Quality Web Programming. We offer blog design and customization services. For blog design and customization, the programmer needs to be eloquent in PHP programming language and at our company you can be assured to get high quality PHP programming service for blog designing. You can also visit our online portfolio to check some of our sample blog designs.
Thanks for the compliment on my blog and for visiting it.
You have a very informative blog.