Designing a Page That Compliments Your Content Pt.1
Creating a unique contribution to the blogosphere that readers will return to over and over is what all bloggers dream of. How do we do it? With content.
In some areas, however, it's safer to follow the well-worn path, sort of like following the Appalacian Trail from Maine to Georgia. Someone found the best path and many others succeeded the trail only because they followed the same worn-in path.
The hard work was done, and the important stuff lay on the other side of the mountainous path. It would have been foolish for a new trailblazer to try to seek a new path through the mountains simply because others had already established one. So it is with developing the look of your blog, at least when you are getting started. Of course, once you are a seasoned explorer, you'll want to seek out the newer and better paths that others overlooked.
Earlier, you chose the kind of blog business you were going to establish, so now it's time to take a look at a few blogs that have successfully made the trek you're setting out on. We're only going to look at the best, most successful blogs to start with, though you'll eventually want to follow a few blog rings to snatch up ideas that can help you build your bloginto all it can be.
If you haven't already done so, do a web search using your favorite search engine,looking for the Top 100 blogs. You may search for keyword specific blogs or just general - it doesn't matter at the moment. You want to find blogs that are very popular to the masses. You may sort them by catagory later.
Now that you have found a few look at their layouts, colors used and images. Focus especially any blogs that resemble yours in content. How do they deal with long posts? How do they link documents? Do they have an archive or previous entries list? What does their header look like? How many columns do they have across the page? where are the links? These questions are important, not because you will copy them, but because there are certain layout standards your readers will expect to see, just like you expect that all newspapers will share a similar format.
Next post will be:
Designing a Page That Compliments Your Content Pt.2 (Artwork)
Happy blogging.
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Kenneth R Sword Jr
Co-CEO - Bizzy Blogz
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