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 Picnik.com to crop and resize them if you don’t have Photoshop.
3. CLEAN UP & ORGANIZE YOUR 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 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, 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.
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!
Comments (20)
Great tips! Quick and painless, thanks so much!
Thanks for the great advice – I have this linked to my blog today too!
Thank you so much for sharing your tips – my blog is a work in progress – I quite like how it looks, but it could be better! I’ve still got a lot to learn, but I love the process and continuous journey of blogging :) Katie. xxx
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Every single one of these tips are completely on point. Every time I’ve “cleaned house” I’ve straightened up something that I never noticed before and I feel like my blog looks better than ever. Wonder what I’ll notice next time!
(PS: I ended up with 304930493 tags so I just gave up. For some reason I struggle with tag organization. Maybe I’ll give it another shot soon!)
sillygrrl Reply:
August 1st, 2011 at 10:54 pm
haha i have a ton too – ended up picking the ones i used most and got the most comments and featured them in my sidebar.
Good tips! Thanks for the advice!
wow. pretty good tips! totally agree with the photo ones :)
im frustrated at my own banner. i am aware that it looks like shyt and nothing special.. but i dont know how to style it! :(
sydsense
All great advice. Blogs without the clutter are a lot easier to navigate and read, without distractions or confusion. I love blogs that are simple that way.
[...] shared 10 Quick Ways to Clean Up Your Blog. Definitely some tips I wish I would have known when I first started [...]
Hi! Great tips! Quick question though! How do you turn off the drop shadow on images when using blogger? They show up on my blog when I use Firefox, but no other browser. Let me know if you know how!
Thanks!
Liz
sillygrrl Reply:
July 26th, 2011 at 4:57 pm
I will write up instructions and post them soon :)
[...] 10 Quick Blog Fixes by Sarah (Silly Grrl). [...]
Great advice! I’ve only just started making the images on my blog the same width, and it really does make a difference
Great tips! I need to edit my tag cloud because it’s getting to be a bit too much.
Good tips! I worked on my sidebars yesterday but I still worry that they’re overwhelming! :/
sillygrrl Reply:
July 21st, 2011 at 1:41 pm
Your side bars look pretty good to me! The headings really break everything up and make it easy to find. If you’re still thinking it’s image heavy, try adding more text :)
Great tips! There’s so much I don’t know about html and Blogger in general that sometimes it all gets ridiculously overwhelming. I should go through and do a quick clean up!
Love this. I’ve been working hard on pruning my tags and getting rid of ones that only appear once. Also have been planning for bigger photos (+ getting rid of the shadows!) in my next layout update. And centered text makes me cry a little. Thanks for pointing out these awesome tips!! :)
yes. yes. yes. and yes.
:)