What Is Your Blog Design Doing For You?

Blog and website design can be a tricky animal for bloggers that do not come from the design or marketing world. Your blog design is your digital business card that creates a snap judgment, first impression on new and existing readers, but…more importantly (and the most overlooked)…your blog design is your medium to convert readers into affiliate income, newsletter subscribers, rss subscribers and viral content spreaders. Is your blog design doing everything it can to insure that the function of your site is performing the necessary tasks? Or is it just what you like to look at on a daily basis?

What Is Your Blog Design Doing For You?

As you look into your own design to make tweaks or redesign it completely, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

  1. What is my blog design doing for me well now?
  2. What isn’t working in my design now?
  3. What do I want my design to do?

While these are simplistic questions with more complicated answers, they get you to the meat and potatoes of any design tweak or rework. There are plenty more questions you need to be asking, but this will get you started on the right track.

1. What Is My Blog Design Doing For Me Well Now?

What aspects of your blog seem to be performing well now? Are you getting a lot of comments? Are you seeing people retweet your articles? Maybe your newsletter and rss numbers are climbing. You need to take an objective look at your existing metrics to see what your readers are interacting well with now and what can be tweaked to increase those conversions.

Many times, simple changes in placement, wording or color can make drastic increases in conversions, so testing out different methods can prove to build upon already positive results. This essential testing through the use of monitoring your statistics and metrics can mean the difference between a successful blog design and one that is leaving things on the table.

2. What Isn’t Working In My Design Now

Do you have elements that are not converting well? Are there items within your design that are not doing anything at all?! If your design is not performing in certain areas, they either need to be reworked to trashed completely. Your screen real-estate is extremely valuable and limited. The last thing you want is a low converting element distracting your readers from more important high converting, business building elements in your design.

One of the biggest mistakes I see bloggers make is adding in too many low converting, non-business building functions into their blog designs.

If that new, super cool widget does not build your business, it needs to go. Do not clutter up your blog design by adding in the latest and greatest of everything. Your design needs to be based off a foundation of function…not what you think is cool that week.

3. What Do I Want My Design To Do?

This is the #1 most important question you need to ask yourself when you are looking at adding design elements or redesigning your blog. It is also the #1 question that 99.9% of bloggers fail to look at as they go through designing processes.

What are the major functions in your blog that need to convert for you to be successful?

  • Do you need to feature your newsletter sign up and free gift?
  • Do you need to have your articles spread through specific social media outlets?
  • Do you need your readers to dive deeper into your content?
  • Do you need to sell more eBooks?

Ask yourself the questions that need answers. Once you have those answers, you can tailor the elements of your design and blog experience around what is going to make you successful in the long run. If you need more newsletter sign-ups, then you probably need to feature that sign-up predominantly on the homepage and in an action section of your post pages (single.php). If you need to get your articles in front of the Reddit audience, you will need to have a share button for that specific social media site at the bottom of your posts.

How Can I Make The Blog Design Process Easier?

While this may seem like a lot to digest at once, you can make life much easier on yourself by following a couple of tips.

1. Use The Tools Available

With free analytics like Google Analytics and paid versions that create heat maps like Crazy Egg, you can find out what your readers are currently clicking on when they visit your blog. Crazy Egg takes it one step further to show you were their mouses are hovering as…statistically…the mouse pointer follows the eyes of most readers.

Tools like these will give you insight into what is working and what is not. They will also give you the ability to test out new placement and other ideas to see what converts better over time.

2. Start Off On The Right Foot

By starting off with a premium theme like the ones from WooThemes, you can cut out 70% of the work. There are plenty of free themes on the market, but the coding is typically subpar and it takes a TON of time to find one that fits the needs of your site. By ponying up and purchasing a premium theme, you can almost get away with doing nothing for awhile as many of the core features that are needed in blogging are built in.

3. Don’t Panic

Go into the design process with the mindset that you are there to make things better. Find excitement in the process and try to to get too overwhelmed as you dive into all that is blog design. Remember…you do not need thousands of dollars to create a quality, high converting blog design, you just need to ask the right questions…

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13 comments

Richard Scott May 19, 2010 - 4:48 pm
I purposefully moved my mouse all over this screen just to throw the statistics off... :) It's always interesting to me to see people make changes to the style, theme and color of their site. Some people change their theme on a weekly basis. One person, daily. Drives me crazy! He does it only because he can't find the perfect FREE one. I'm constantly tweaking my site. Small things. Testing. Trying. Seeing what works and what doesn't. Every site is different and you never know what will maximize money until you change it. A simple thing like a Buy it now button being orange versus blue can make all the difference in the world. BTW, Your blog always looks great!
Robb Sutton May 19, 2010 - 10:23 pm
I don't take my own advice a lot and make changes pretty frequently. Normally, I would say only change maybe once a year to insure you do not cause brand confusion. But...I have a master plan to all of these changes that should hold for a pretty long while! (hopefully) Testing is key though...you are right about the color change BTW...and testing that is part of the reason for ridding everything of color right now!
Joe Boyle May 19, 2010 - 5:38 pm
I love Wordpress themes. Just recently, I transitioned to a new theme and saw a double in my website's traffic. It's amazing how much a quick design change can do! I also tweak settings like plug-ins, pages, styles, codes, etc. to make everything more enjoyable for my readers. When it comes down to it - the website is form them, so why not make it the best experience possible?
Robb Sutton May 19, 2010 - 10:24 pm
Wordpress does make things insanely easy...a lot easier than the hand coding days for sure! I don't miss those....
We Fly Spitfires May 19, 2010 - 5:55 pm
Hey Robb! Interesting article about design... right as you updated the theme on your site! If I'm being honest though, I'm not a fan of it at all :( I much preferred your previous theme. This new white background is incredibly overpowering and it's very hard to actually see what your latest article is on the homepage. Also the calls to action on the previous design seemed a lot more powerful and effective :( Sorry, just my two cents! Of course now I'm wondering if I've hit your site right as it's being updated or something and thus this comment will make me look like a complete dork :)
Robb Sutton May 19, 2010 - 10:25 pm
Yeah I liked the previous one too...but it wasn't performing like I wanted it too and I was having to work around some coding issues that I didn't feel like fighting anymore. I have a master plan for this whole deal that should work out in the end. Thanks for your input though!
alex May 20, 2010 - 1:32 am
I think it was better in black, but then I'm not the owner of more than three very successful blogs so.... I like the madness, the method's even better! Thanks for a great post, those first three questions provide a great 'self assessed framework' to work your blog design around
Robb Sutton May 20, 2010 - 6:00 am
I liked it too..hell I made it! There is a grand scheming plan in this entire thing. Have to go after higher conversions and have something that looks good at the same time!
Muzi Mohale May 20, 2010 - 4:38 am
Hi Robb, I actually first saw the headline theme in action through your blog and purchased it as well. However right now, I'm not happy with my bounce rate which is too high at 70% with 60% of my traffic coming from search engines. Would you say the theme contributes to the bounce rate?
Robb Sutton May 20, 2010 - 5:59 am
Muzi, There are a lot of things that can affect bounce rate and blogs historically are pretty high in this number. You need to find which pages the bounce rate is the highest and investigate which keywords the users are searching when they land on those pages. It might be a case where they were actually looking for something else. How are your pages per visit and time on site? If those are relatively high...you might just have a case of un-targeted traffic bringing down your numbers (or up'ing the percentage in this case).
Tony Ruiz May 21, 2010 - 1:52 am
You have a very impressive design here Rob - I have to agree with you that the blog design is basically your online business card (I like to think on my blog as an virtual office). The better the design the more it makes me want to come back.
Ahmad Wali May 21, 2010 - 5:20 am
I am always confused about my own blog design and never like other people ideas that much. Today I visited robbsutton.com I said to myself previous theme design was looking much better.
Kristina June 2, 2010 - 2:46 am
Good blog design is very important for a website. Blog design should tempt the users to click the categories of the site and improves the conversion rate. An informative article on good designing.
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