Blogs are so cluttered! This is one realization you’ll end up with when you’re in the business of reading (and writing) blogs. Most blogs around are simply too cluttered to be any useful. Many bloggers, quite unfortunately, fall under the mistaken assumption that more information is better. Well, in most cases, it is my opinion that less is more.

Fact is, most users won’t give a damn about most stuff on your blog, anyway. What matters is that you lead them to where they would most likely find the information they might want.

Most of my blog traffic (the old J Spot and the J Spotter) comes from the search engines. And people who come from the search engines are not necessarily bloggers themselves. Most are casual browsers, searching for relevant information, which for some reason I have written about in my blog. What these people need are navigable pages and websites, and not sites full of gibberish and junk.

One of my ideal blogs is Joel Spolsky’s Joel on Software. On your first visit, you’ll know what the blog is all about. There are helpful texts and outlines that will indicate what exactly he does, and what exactly the site is for. I think it’s the ultimate in user-friendliness and usability. I tried to pattern the J Spotter after Joel’s blog, in terms of the availability of help texts and outlines.

The Minimalist

I think most blogs start out this way—minimalistic. Most designs are simple, and most work. Not all designs, though, have helpful links and navigation features. But still, they’re all right. Things go bad when a blogger tries to add too much information on the sidebars, headers, footers, and on the blog content area itself.

Again, less is best. I don’t mean that you should take out all information on your site. It’s best to strike a good balance in designing and conceptualizing your blog.

The List

Here are a few suggestions on how to set up a good blog design-wise:

1. Contrast. Make sure your blog is readable by ensuring an adequate contrast level.
2. Copy Size. Text that’s too big or too small is simply annoying.
3. Speed. Optimize for speed. Not everyone’s on broadband, you know.
4. Harmony. Out-of-this-world colors? Pictures running off the borders? Ugly blogs suck. Period.
5. Helpful text. Readers would appreciate text that tells them who you are and what exactly your blog is all about.
6. Navigation. Provide prominent links to relevant areas of your site. At the very least, make your blog and post titles clickable (leading to the homepage or static pages, respectively).

Tags: blogs, Blogs and blogging, clutter, Design, software, Usability, web | Viewed 4203 times