We’ve shared so many different places to get a blog design made for you – but what makes a blog layout easy on the eye? We came up with five points to check on to see how your blog performs.
Images
If images are all different widths, especially in the same post, then it can really stick out like a sore thumb! Check out this post for a simple bit of code to use that will keep your images from overtaking the rest of your blog or just make sure that all images are the same width when you edit them for the blog.
Try to make sure that your images are of a good quality – you’re probably put off by blurry, dark images so make sure yours are as good as you’d expect from anyone else! Use Picmonkey to tweak your images to make them even more beautiful.
Colours
Most bloggers go for a white background on their blog to go for the cleaner look – but that doesn’t mean you should follow the crowd. Choose a palette for your blog layout (paletton.com could help you there) and stick to those colours. If you choose a photo for your header image, then you can use sites like Pictaculous to generate a palette from it.
Choose a neutral colour for your background colour, and make sure the text colour is readable.Red on Green or Yellow on Purple are a little unreadable!
Design
If you ask most people what the best kind of layout to go for is, they’ll probably say a plain, simple one. While that’s a good place to start, don’t be afraid to make the layout look more personal to you. Look at Wish Wish Wish for an example of this – the design has lots of elements that are personal to Carrie, but it’s still very easy to navigate.
Having more than one column on the layout is quite standard, so you’re able to share other things (links, ads, etc) on every post, but don’t assume that you have to have those – as you may have noticed, this website doesn’t have a second column on the home page to draw you attention to the posts more.
It’s a good idea to have the column where your content will go for each post as wide as comfortably possible so your’re also able to have larger photos.
Clear the Clutter
It can be tempting to add lots of badges, etc to your sidebar and widgets to your blog posts, but by having lots of them, it could be distracting and messy. Every so often, go through your sidebar and clear out the links that don’t work, the banners that are no longer relevant, and anything you’re just not interested in.
Use pages to keep certain details – at the very least, you’ll probably want an about me page, and a contact me page,but you could also remove things from your side bar and move them to a page like your archives or blog roll – this will give you more space to give more details and links as well!
Text
As previously discussed, you need to make sure the blog is actually readable – make sure your colour choices work well together. Choose a font that is readable – the curly script writing might be pretty, but can you actually read it as the main text on a page? Choose a web safe font to make sure that your blog looks how you expect it to, and choose a size that isn’t ridiculously tiny or huge.
Of course, rules are made for breaking! What tips would you give for a layout you love?
Great tips. Thank you!