How can you improve your blog design? Check out our 15 best tips

Blog design is a tricky ‘ol thing. What one person loves, another loathes so finding some tips on improving your blog design, that appeals to the majority of bloggers has been a challenge but I think I’ve got there.

In the following article I’m sharing 12 things you can do to your website or blog right now, to help improve its look and performance. These are things I’ve done many times myself and which are tried and tested.

1. Simplify Your Colour Palette

When looking choosing your branding and colour palette for your blog, a good rule of thumb is to choose 2 to 3 shades that compliment each other well. Any more than this and things will start looking messy and confusing, which isn’t great when you’re trying to be consistent.

Opposite colours on the colour wheel generally work nicely alongside each other. For example blue and orange as demonstrated by Blogging Wizard, work together wonderfully as opposite colours. Alternatively try choosing one single, bold shade and matching it with a neutral colour. Ashley from Mad Lemmings achieves this beautifully with a stylish Red, Grey and Black palette.

2. Declutter Your Sidebar

If you’ve got a standard content/sidebar layout on your blog, your sidebar is likely littered with cool widgets, banner ads, social icons and badges. While it might seem like a great idea to display these wherever you can, it’s only going to distract your readers from the real meat of your content.

When approaching my own sidebar I have a simple rule. If it isn’t beautiful and doesn’t help me or my readers, it gets removed. The last thing you want is people clicking away before they’ve read your latest update.

3. Clean Up Your Navigation

As with your sidebar, it’s important to ensure your site navigation is clear, easy to understand and more importantly gets people from A to B in the least amount of time. You want your audience to instantly know where they are on your website should they land on a random page, as well as how to swiftly move to other pages. If they can’t navigate your blog, they’ll just click on to the next one.

Many WordPress Themes these days include multi-level menus as standard. Utilise the power of these menus to organize your pages so they make sense. Keep your most important pages prominent on your Primary Navigation and order the rest of your pages into sub-menus to keep things clear.

4. Consolidate Your Social Buttons

There’s one thing that really gets under my skin when browsing other blogs and I can’t seem to shift the feeling of annoyance. It’s seeing multiple social sharing and social profile buttons and widgets all over the page. Sure I get that you want to encourage people to share your content and follow your profiles but sometimes you can go over the top!

Again, try to keep things simple. Use a social sharing plugin in your posts. The plugin I use is Genesis Simple Share, one that’s lightweight, looks good and which can be placed either at the top, at the bottom or top and bottom of your content.

Do the same for your follow buttons but then leave it at that. You don’t need multiple ‘follow me on twitter’ buttons or several bloglovin images. Going simple will put the same message out there, but save you space (and your readers a dazzling headache) at the same time.

5. Reconsider Your Ads

Banner ads are great if you’re making a decent amount of money from them. I even have one in the footer of this site, that links to my affiliate – StudioPress. I love their themes, use them regularly and so want to promote their awesomeness amongst my readers.

If you’re not making any money from your ads however, consider getting rid of them. Ask yourself a simple question to help you decide: Will getting rid of this ad dramatically decrease my income? If the answer is no, bin it. If it’s yes, keep it. Aside from earning you some pennies, ads encourage people to click away from your website – not something you really want them to do (plus most look awful!).

6. Customize Your Footer Credits

Scroll down to the bottom of this page and look at the text. Do you see it? The teeny tiny footer credits? By default your theme will normally display something generic in this area, taking up space you could be using for something else. Instead, why not use this space to display links to your privacy policy or to simply state your copyright information? How about a little message to people who by chance really look at that area?

In his recent post on his design blog, Brian Gardner shares a handy tutorial users of the Genesis Framework can implement to customize their site footer. For non genesis users, a quick browse in the WordPress.org forums will yield the instructions you’re looking for.

7. Optimize Your Images

Images are all the rage right now, and for good reason. They’re a great way to grab your readers attention and to deliver important messages. But how many of you really optimize your images for the web? When I say optimize I mean resizing and reducing the file size of an image, so that it loads quicker on your website.

For me, optimizing images is one of the best ways to make the images on my site look more uniform and thus more aesthetically pleasing, as well as increasing page speeds. I start with the image itself, reducing the width in pixels to around 800. I pin a lot of my images on Pinterest and so like to use taller images, however for featured images I tend to go with a height of no more than 500 pixels.

Once I’ve resized my image, I then compress it using either tinypng.com or tinyjpg.com depending on the file type. This removes any unnecessary elements from the image, giving you a much smaller file size. Most of the time you can expect a reduction of up to 80%! So it’s a practice that’s well worth doing if you want to reap those benefits.

8. Utilize White Space

The power of white space is really underestimated by many. It’s not simply a way to achieve a minimal, simplistic blog design, but a tool that allows your content to pop out from the page. As bloggers our most important content is usually our written word, but what’s the point of writing if those words are drowned out by garish colours and eye watering backgrounds?

Maintaining a good deal of white space in and around your typography, helps draw the eye to your words, filtering out potential distractions and providing an optimal reading experience.

9. Update Your Theme

I’ve redesigned quite a lot of blogs since launching my blog design services and there’s one thing I see over and over again. Out of date themes and plugins. People, please keep your themes, your plugins and your WordPress installations up to date! I can’t stress this one enough!

If your blog was Mordor, and the hackers were Frodo and Samwise intent on stealing your precious, they’d have been in and out in an instant and Frodo would still have all fingers intact!

Weird Lord of The Rings metaphors aside, keeping things up to date is one of the best ways to keep the hackers out. A blogger I worked with recently paid to have her blog designed. The designer installed heaps of plugins (most of which really weren’t needed and weren’t actively being updated anymore) and hackers gained access to her blogs and wreaked havoc. This happened to my client twice before I went in and cleaned everything out. So please, stay vigilant and stay updated.

10. Use Optimized Fonts

The typography of your website plays an important part in how it looks, reads and behaves. It’s great to experiment with custom fonts but sometimes those big curly letters do nothing for how readable your content is and can impact on your page speeds.

An article on Creative Bloq delves into some of the most popular free web fonts, including some of my favourites such as Open Sans, Lato and Vollkorn. Try restricting the fancier, script fonts to your headings and titles and add simpler, clearer fonts like Helvetica and Lato for the body font. For great font pairings take a look at the Google Web Fonts Typographic Project to give you some inspiration.

11. Be Choosy With Your Stock Photos

I’m pretty sure you’ve seen many websites using the same old, cliched, vacant-eyed stock photos to illustrate their content. Let’s face it there are plenty of these images available and they get the job done. But do you really want your website or blog to look as generic as everyones elses?

There’s no reason why you can’t have beautiful imagery accompanying your articles and you don’t even need to be a budding photographer to do so. Websites are literally throwing high-resolution stock photos at you, you just need to know where to look. Check out my post on free stock photo websites for a list of places that won’t cost an arm or a leg to use, or have a look at The Dollar Photo Club (using my affiliate link), an exclusive stock photo club where each image is only a dollar at a time.

12. Make It Responsive

The last bit of advice I’m going to leave you with is probably one of the most important. First let me ask you a question: are you reading this on your tablet? How about your smartphone? I ask this because I’m trying to make a point about the responsivity (is that even a word?) of a website.

More and more people are browsing content from mobile devices. This means it’s crucial that your website is mobile responsive in order for your readers to get the best experience. If your site doesn’t adapt, people are going to move on to the next one. It’s as simple as that.

To make this easy on you, look for WordPress themes that are fully responsive. StudioPress is a great place to look if you use the Genesis Framework, while Themeforest is also a wealth of functional premium themes, most of which are also readily responsive (affiliate links). If you use JetPack, the mobile site module will instantly make your website mobile friendly – this is really useful if you’re not keen on swapping out your theme for a new one.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately your blog design is your own business, however there are things you can do to make sure you get the very best from it. If you follow at least some of my advice, you’ll make some great improvements that your readers will secretly thank you for!

What would you add to this list? Let me know in the comments.