Design Considerations for Blogs: A Lesson Learned

I was writing a post today about the value of sidebar content and realised, my old theme was past it’s use-by date for me, so I am updating it. I chose my old theme as it reflected creativity, I now wish I’d examined the pros and cons further. If you are a blogger, you may like to consider these readability and navigation issues in your blog design.

The links were all in red and not used. It could be that it’s not easily recognised that they are links, especially by new Internet users. I know underlined links are old fashioned, but looking at my stats, link following is extremely low, so that has to tell me something! All links from the blog are now blue, I will have to manually underline links when writing posts to make them more obvious. For example, Visit my web site for free content for writers and Pages iWork Suite templates vs can you see this link amongst the black?
The list of my Pages under my heading banner looked like it was sliding downwards at a drunken angle. It had driven me nuts since day one! Once I actually got a ruler, held it to the screen and put it down to being an optical illusion. The pages were so rarely visited. Perhaps they just didn’t stand out as links either?
My older, migraine-affected eyes can’t take the smaller text size anymore. Readers would have had the same issue and may have exited my blog because of it.
There is a need to clearly outline Copyright and Liability (an awful necessity.)
I’ve added a testimonial page which gives my work additional credibility.
My e-books needed greater prominence and non-essential elements such as my Twitter feed, needed to be removed to keep the blog clean, easy to read and effective in reaching my audience.

I really like this clean, easy to read layout!  I miss the bar at the base of posts, but it seemed ineffective anyway. This has been a worthwhile exercise in making me think about where I place information and what is needless. Feedback is most welcome!

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