Is Your Blog Design Like A Bad Comb Over?
Filed in Blog Better (Blogging 401), Design Matters (Blogging 301)
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I love to “people watch”. Yes, it sounds like a strange way to spend time but I find it rather fun to sit in a public place — say, a busy park on a temperate midwinter day — and gaze at passersby as I wonder who they are, where they’re from, what they want out of life, what they’re really like as people.
Often I find myself wondering whether certain people I see even own a mirror and, if so, do they actually use it? That ample-bellied lady hanging out of her turquoise stretch pants and banana yellow midriff blouse: what was she thinking? Doesn’t the middle-aged balding man see how ridiculous his comb over looks, particularly when flaps in the breeze?
Sometimes when I visit blogs I find myself wondering the same thing as I encounter a page crammed with badges, buttons and emoticons, one where there is so much going on that my browser struggles just to load the page. I think those bloggers somehow believe that they look good no matter what the generally accepted rules of fashion or blog design say.
Are you one of them?
If you quickly answered “No” to that question, how can you be so certain you’re any different than the man with the comb over? After all, just as you’ve been happy with your page for a while, he’s been happy with his hairstyle for a long time, too. Obviously, he hasn’t caught on to the fact that what used to look good now looks ridiculous. Have you made the same mistake with your page?
1. You don’t need so many stinkin’ badges. New bloggers often (wrongly) believe badges make them look popular, so they snatch up every opportunity to slap one on their page. Never mind that the badge which declares them a “Groovy Kind Of Gal” (or whatever) was created by a fellow blogger to score a link back to their own site. Never mind that the color doesn’t even match their template, or that readers know most are meaningless. They still believe the badges somehow make them look Important.
They are wrong.
Imagine you’re visiting someone’s home. Would you be more comfortable in a tastefully decorated, quiet environment where you can sit conversing with your hostess, or one where you had to step around piles of old magazines and try not to tune out your host as you stare at the cheap posters thumbtacked all over the walls? Your badges make your blog look like that cluttered house. Clean up your sidebars and return the focus to your content.
2. Emoticons do not belong in blog entries. Unless you’re a teenager blogging on MySpace, emoticons have no place in your entries. As one article puts it: You’re an adult. Quit it with the smiley faces. While some people believe they make a blog look more personal, that’s not the look you want to convey when you’re hoping to make money with your blog.
Using emoticons in entries tells potential advertisers that you cannot find the right words to express your sentiments. If that’s the case, why should anyone pay you to find the right words to describe their product or service?
3. Make sure your page loads fast. A study on internet users found that 75% say they will never return if a page takes longer than 4 seconds to load. That’s three out of four people. Can you afford to lose that kind of traffic?
Images and graphics are often the cause of slow-loading pages. Getting rid of the badges, buttons and emoticons can definitely improve your page-load time, and so can optimizing the images on your blog.
Another cause of slow-loading pages are javascript bells and whistles like Twitter badges, Chatterboxes and blog community widgets. The more javascripts running on a site, the more work browsers have to do to load that page. One way to find out if a javascript is slowing your page load time is to visit your site and watch your browser’s status bar. If it hangs while processing a particular widget then it’s time for that widget to go. But what if you really, really, really like that widget?! Then you need to defer its execution until the rest of your page has loaded.
Remember, people, you’ve got four seconds to make a good impression. Do you really want folks to think of you as the blogosphere’s version of the man with a bad comb over? Then stop trying to convince yourself that what looks ridiculous on other people somehow looks good on you.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Blog Better (Blogging 401), Design Matters (Blogging 301). Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Tagged in: blog badges | blog buttons | blog design | blogger | bloggers | sidebar
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Thank you for the link. Great post, and hopefully people will take to heart what you have written.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to never see a cluttered page or emoticon in an entry ever again?
Hey, Kate. I love the new blog. I have been playing with the idea of earning money from my blogs for a while, so I really appreciate reading your advice.
When I read number 2, I got a chuckle out of it because I read EV in Google Reader and every entry has a smiley at the end of it.
Charity’s last blog post..Giveaway: Organic Gardening Magazine
You’re kidding!
Rassin’ frassin’ feeds.
(Update: Found the cause. The Blog Voyeur plugin apparently inserts that into the bottom of feeds. I’ve deleted it, so please let me know if the feed looks odd now. And thank you for the heads up!)
Okay, that’s just funny.
jae’s last blog post..Eye strain
Aw man, I love emoticons though! I’m a true addict too.
:-O
BTW, the best way to test your load time is to install the Firebug plugin. I honestly cannot tell you what a HUGE difference it made in troubleshooting my site, especially in pinpointing exactly what widgets and javascript codes are holding everything else up. It also allows you to preview changes you make to your stylesheet and HTML in REAL time as well. A true godsend for me.
BTW, those badges also take up valuable real estate on your blog too. If you want to increase the value of your advertising space then they can’t be competing with a gabooolion widgets and whatnots, you know?
AHHH I did it again! :-O AHHHHHHHH I can’t stop!
Ah nuts I did the smilie thing again.
Linc, thanks for the tip on Firebug. I’m going to give it a whirl!
I’ve been working on the look of my blog lately. I had a pretty crowded sidebar, but I am trying to fix that.
I love emoticons though, lol … Can’t help it!
Christine’s last blog post..Hair! Long Beautiful Hair!
Don’t get me wrong, Christine. I have no problem with them in comments or email. In both places, emoticons can serve as a kind of shorthand I suppose.
But in an entry? Nope. They look unprofessional, they’re distracting, they add to the visual clutter on a page and they pretty much say the blogger doesn’t trust the reader to get the point of what they wrote (or that they don’t trust their own writing skills to convey it).