In a parallel with real life, particularly if your blog is a commercial blog as mine is, your blog is, not only your home base in cyberspace, it is also like your high-street shop: That means that your blog’s pages and posts, with particular reference to the Home Page, are like your shop-window displays.

On the internet things happen a lot faster; so when a visitor to your online shop visits and sees your display, they’re instantly looking for a reason to stick around. – Put another way they’re instantly looking for a reason not to go elsewhere, as soon as they arrive. – Because the internet is a massive shopping-mall with millions of shops, none of them are really exclusive boutiques, and if your shop doesn’t look “right” then they will move on to elsewhere almost straight away.

Get it Right

- So what actually does look “right”? – Well you can’t be all things to every single person on the planet; so no matter how you have your display set out, not everybody is going to like it. – Does that mean you can have it exactly as YOU want it then, because someone somewhere is going to like it, and someone else, somewhere, is going to hate it? Yes and no: –

You see what you’re trying to accomplish is to make more people – a lot more people – like it, than the few who, conversely, hate it. – Because those who like it have a lot more chance of sticking around and making a purchase than those who hate it and leave straight away

Allow me to explain this further with a textual illustration: -

You want to find a particular rare-niche-product online, so you consult a search-engine. The search-engine returns two results and you begin browsing:

You browse along to online-shop A: –

This online store has a beautifully-designed and well-laid-out “shop-window display” on its Home Page; eye-catching but not overly flamboyant. The display’s colour-synchronisation seems to suggest the shop’s market-niche. Overall it’s presented with simplicity so that the eye gently wanders from one display item naturally on to the next. The pages and posts are also similarly colour-synchronised, and they lend weight to clarity of their main-content – so that you can easily see what is on offer, while a few other advertisements also catch your eye.

You bookmark that store, and browse along to online-shop B. : –

This store has white text on a black background which is obscuring a lot of other text. “Fantastic Savings!” Exclaims an orange-lettered banner highlighted in bright red that drops down from the top of the page obscuring your view. You dismiss the notice with some annoyance, only to be confronted with so many more advertised special offers that you’ll be all day just reading them. The myriad of special offer notices tell you of massively reduced prices on items that you weren’t intending to purchase. Further down the page a buxom blonde, who’s either had a massive-boob-job or was born overly-top-heavy, is posing on a recliner chair, right above a picture of a pile of ten-dollar-bills with J.R. Ewing from the 1970s soap-opera, “Dallas” proclaiming something. There are offers crammed into every available space on the page, and as you think that you’ve just seen what you did want to purchase – with a 25% discount offer on it; a popup appears, obscuring the view, crammed with a huge compacted list of more of today’s fantastic once-only offers on everything that you didn’t want.

You hurriedly click the back button, and a prompt appears on screen asking you whether you really want to leave the page. – Of course you really want to leave the fragging page; you wouldn’t have clicked the back button if you wanted to stay on it!

Back at shop A you click on the item you wanted to purchase. It appears to be rather expensive from this shop; but at least it won’t be an intimidating experience purchasing it…

It Sucks!

Store B’s presentation sucked! It was cluttered, it was badly laid out, it was hard to follow, it was intimidating. The fact that the other store was the place where you’d definitely have got by far the better deal didn’t bother you one iota: The fact that store B’s presentation was awful actually stopped you from even looking at what it had to offer.

Can you see what I’m getting at here? Store B will not make anywhere near as much money for its owner as store A because as soon as a visitor sees the home page they’re instantly confused: It’s crammed with far too much information – So crammed in fact that it’s heavily-cluttered. The prospective customer doesn’t know which way to turn first, and isn’t impressed: – In fact they’re alarmed and overwhelmed; intimidated, and looking for a way out. The owner inadvertently spent their advertising budget on giving their competitor the advantage!

Lots to Learn

- And yes; I’ve personally been there myself in the past with this blog, done it, and even got the very costly T-shirt marks to prove it. I’m not saying that I’ve got it 100% right now even. There’s so much to consider, so much to learn and know.

Here are three of the major factors to consider with regard to your blog’s design and layout: –

1. Colour. – Yes, colour matters. Would you read this blog if it had a pink colour-scheme? (I know some of you may remember that it once, years ago, did have a pink colour-scheme.) You might like pink. I like pink. – I love pink! – But this is a tech and online-help blog; not a feminine-issues or a beauty-tips blog. Blue is relaxing. Blue is stable, factual, accomplishing. – And the pastel-blue/grey background is gentle and welcoming, removing the worry, calming and reassuring. I’m not going to go into the subject in great detail at this point; but colour is always an important consideration.
2. Clutter. – A cluttered blog is confusing, and the reader instantly gets lost and goes elsewhere. Keep the clutter to a minimum and allow the reader to find things as easily as is possible on an organised page.
3. Eye-Path. – Your reader typically starts reading in the top-left corner. If there’s nothing particularly in the top-left corner their eye moves to the centre of the screen and downwards. Your reader wants to know four main things at this point: 1) What is this blog called? 2) What is this blog about? 3) Whose blog is it? And, more importantly, 4) Is it worth scrolling down to see more – or shall I leave? If they do scroll down then their eye will try to find a path to follow. If the page is cluttered or the path ends abruptly then there’s a large likelihood that they’ll get lost and leave.

In Conclusion

Do always analyse your designs. Get someone else to do so for you too: Would you and they find the layout appealing? Would you and they be encouraged to look further? Is your page or post easy to follow? Does the blog’s colour-scheme appear to suggest the niche-market that it caters for? 

If not then make it so. – A bad layout can do more harm than good.