10 Quick Blog Fixes
Everyone deserves a good looking blog. You don’t have to be nutty like me and tweak your blog on the daily, but a once-over every couple months will make your blog easier to navigate and a pretty space for your readers to visit.
1. Give your posts room to breathe
Increase the width of your blog to add a little white space between your sidebar(s) and main column.
2. Bigger photos are better
Try making all your photos (vertical or horizonal) one standard width that fills your main column. The photos on my blog are all 620 pixels wide and it helps make my posts look organized. You can use Pixlr.com to crop and resize them if you don’t have Photoshop.
3. Clean up and organize sidebars
Think about what can be deleted, moved into a page, or shuffled around to make content on your sidebar easier to find. Do you really need two sidebars or will everything fit into one?
4. Be social
Is it easy to find your Twitter, Facebook, Email and RSS subscription links? I like having mine toward the top of my sidebar.
5. Make your titles stand out
Use the Google Font API to make your blog titles a little fancy, but play with the sizing to make sure they’re still easy to read!
6. Pick a color palette
Keep it simple – choose a main color and an accent color and keep the rest black, gray and white.
7. Everybody to the left
Aligning your text to the left or justified (instead of having it centered) will make it much easier to read and keep your columns nice and clean.
8. Prune your tags
Don’t overwhelm your readers with a list of 200 tags, pick the top 10 or 20 you use the most and feature just those. More info on organizing tags and categories >>>
9. Use your head
If your header space is, say, 920 pixels wide, fill it up! Make your photos, graphics and text stretch across the entire space. On the height side, I wouldn’t go taller that 250 pixels or you risk pushing all your content too far down on smaller monitors.
10. Get out of the shadows [ instructions ]
This one is for Blogger users…I recommend turning off the automatic shadows on your photos so graphics and text looks like…
There…now doesn’t that look better?
P.S. If you follow my blogging tips I’d love to see before and after screenshots, post them in the comments!
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07.21.11 in blogging, design, nerd party
I have a question about changing something in blogger that I can’t figure out for the life of me. Right now I have my sidebars background color as transparent but what comes out is a grey color. When I change it to white, it’s becomes a solid white bar and you can’t see the background of my blog at all… Is there a way to have them transparent entirely, where you would see no color behind any of my sidebar gadgets aside from the background of my blog scrolling behind them?
I can’t help but feel that the shadows look nicer in that example? Haha! Each to their own I suppose!
I actually have the opposite problem with my sidebar at the moment… It’s so ridiculously empty!
Great tips! These are really helpful. haha Shadows drive me nuts (and I find that for some reason on different web browsers they still show up even after removing them). I don’t understand why they are a default anyway :( Down with shadows!
Thank you so much for this post! I agree with Whitney, yes, yes, and yes!!! I couldn’t agree more! I’m not a designer but I have learned quite a few things from my computer programming and graphic designing husband, as well as from blogs I visit and what I like and don’t like. After reading this post I turned to my husband and said, finally a blogger’s tips that you (and I) agree with!
There was one that I just came around to. For some reason I have this urge to make some of my text center-faced event though I know many of us read top to bottom left to right. So I just recently got out of that bad habit. I’m working on a completely new design now that I think incorporates all of this and much of what he’s tuaght me. Thanks for the info and I’m going to go on and read your other blogging posts!
~Aubrey