Blog Design: My List

After I decided that I wanted to redesign my blog, I started by looking at the blogs that I visit most often and made a list of the things that I loved as well as a list of the things that bothered me.

I was brutal. I compared my blog with each one in order to figure out what I wanted to improve on and what I was doing that might be driving my readers crazy. I also asked myself what I already liked about the way things were.

I'll let you in on my list...It went something like this:

First things, first. I noticed that every single blog that I was most drawn to had a super simple greeting. The heading was less about art and more about a nice font. The navigation bar was centered and big and had headings that you found yourself wanting to click on.

I loved the feeling the picture behind my header gave to my blog and the way it brought in the blues and greens that I loved, but after much deliberation, I decided that it needed to go.

As much as I liked the font, I decided to find one that was similar, but easier to read.

Another trend I noticed was that people had started trying to make individual posts stand out by the way they were formatted. The easiest way to do this is to make the post headers large and to center them.

As much as I love purple, I decided that the body of my post being purple was probably not the most attractive choice. I'm still not 100% happy with my font choice. There are several bloggers whose font alone draws me in. I've tried to figure out which font it is, they all say they don't know or that it's Arial. I've loaded Arial as my default font and it doesn't look right. Either way, I streamlined my fonts and colors and I THINK it's much better than before.

Giving my sidebar a makeover probably made the biggest difference. Everyone commented on it. I cleaned it up, made buttons for different categories I post about most often, and created specific spaces for different features. I also made my own social media buttons and started working on connecting with my readers at each one.

By the time I got to the different footers, the biggest decisions were behind me. I had learned a ton about the different ways you could customize even the smallest details and I was brave enough to start trying them.

Prior to updating my blog, I had decided to try adding Engageya. I chose it because of the option to have the circular links rather than square ones. Everyone loved it. I loved it. And so, I decided it would stay.

The messiness of blogger's default for their footers was really bugging me. I wanted to do what I could to make it easier to navigate, more appealing to look at, and to make it match the rest of the aesthetic of clean lines and easy to read fonts I was going for with the rest of my design.

Once I had decided what I liked and what I didn't, I made a list of specific tasks that I needed to complete. As I did my research, I kept my eye out for tutorials and started emailing my friends so that I could actually make the changes that I wanted to make.

What are your pet peeves when it comes to the blogs you read?

Is there anything about your blog design that you put a lot of thought into?