BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

Blog design is fun. But unless you are a paid professional, chances are you cannot spend all your time on it.

If you are still in school, you have homework to do, tests to study for, and grades to make, so you will pass. And those of us who are good at design are often not so good at math, science, and other topics. Just as techies are often not so good at writing, spelling and grammar.

Doing well in school is important. After all, you have a much better chance of getting a design job or a technical job doing what you love if you finish school. High school is mandatory. College is getting to be.

What do you do to make sure you pass all those hard (but required) courses? Get some help at Tutorhub, an online tuition and homework help website. You can work with other kids to share homework questions and work together to solve them on line. If you need more help, you can contact tutors online for one-on-one help (for a reasonable charge) from a specialist in your subject.

So knock out that homework with a little help from your new friends and study partners. And if you still have problems getting it, or need help passing a test, you can get a professional tutor to help you.

Then you can get back to designing blogs and having fun. Deal?

As blog designers we need to keep up with not only the latest designs, technology, software and SEO, but also with the latest business trends as they affect the sites we design. It is not all about the pretty colors—or even the content.

As users become accustomed to more and more interactivity—with smart phones, tablets, advanced web designs, and more—we need to provide more and more interactivity on websites and blogs. Especially for business, and even if our clients have not thought of it yet.

Business communication used to be a one-way street. Companies made announcements, ran ads, released news. Customers waited to be persuaded. Or sold. Not anymore.

Interactivity is now essential for business websites. It has been especially important for consumer confidence in new technology such as home banking.

Consequently live chat features have become a standard for ecommerce sites to make connections with site visitors. And LivePerson, which has been around since 1995, provides the most comprehensive live chat software for business.

As the first company to make chat an active sales tool, LivePerson is a chat technology innovator. In fact, they lead customer relationship technology with chat software that includes a behavioral targeting engine to give the customer a convincing, effective, and pleasant experience.

LivePerson has live chat solutions for all kinds of sites. They offer good-looking graphics and specialized products for all kinds of businesses and customers. This is top of the line chat that increases sales, because customers like it.

That means that as blog designers, we need to recommend it to our clients and incorporate it in the sites we build.

ANALOGOUS COLOR SCHEME Image via Wikipedia

Many of us have an almost childlike desire to have ideas judged on their own merits rather than on their presentation. We imagine it would be nice if every idea could be heard out for the validity of its claims instead of judged by the merits or flaws of the messenger.

But in practice, none of us actually believes this. When is the last time you actually appreciated the look of a spinning .gif? Has Comic Sans font actually ever made you stop and look more closely at an article? Can you honestly say that a mingled mash of very bright colors doesn’t put you off of a website?

All right, so these are perhaps extreme examples, but they do illustrate the point that appearance is still considered important.

And not all examples are so cut and dried; sometimes the text is just too small and poorly spaced to read properly, the lack of pictures makes a site too text-dense, the color tone is just subtly off in a way that looks unpleasant and drives off potential readers or all the images and videos are on the front page, making it take excessively long to load.

Paying attention to appearance and to some basic web and blog design elements can make the visit to your blog more enjoyable for your audience and help you retain those vital traffic numbers. Read the rest of this entry →

Image by Kbedi via Flickr

From the content to the layout and design, a business blog should accurately portray your brand message while keeping readers continuously interested and loyal.

If your blog content or design is stale and no longer an accurate portrayal of your brand image, it’s time to consider a major makeover.

When there is a disconnect between your message and what you are portraying, you run the risk of losing your targeted audience and key influencers.

Below are 4 blog elements to consider changing:

Design / Theme: If you’ve had the same blog theme for a year or two now, it’s time to update your look. When brainstorming how you want your new blog design to look, consider how your brand story has changed / developed over the past year or two.

Your company might have drastically evolved from what it once was. Your blog design should reflect this new image and express it accurately. Read the rest of this entry →

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BlogCatalog.com has come up with an interesting replacement for the BlogRush widget. It displays your own blog posts (on however many blogs you have registered with BlogCatalog) and some other activities such as Diggs. You’ll see one in the right-hand sidebar of this page.

You can choose from about eight colors, and you set the width (in pixels) and the number of items to display (so you effectively control the height as well). If you have several blogs, this is a great way to send traffic from one to another.

Besides the WordPress version, you can create BlogCatalog widgets that work with Blogger and TypePad blogs as well. It is easy and fun.

BlogCatalog offers four different widgets in all. If you scroll down, you will see their Recent Viewers widget (with dozens of tiny pictures). Those are also highly customizable. You can choose the size, number of pictures, color of the frame and the text, and so on.

Widgets are just one of the benefits of belonging to the BlogCatalog community. You can get great exposure for you blogs there, join groups, make friends, and find many interesting and entertaining blogs. I highly recommend it.

Below that is a similar widget, created at MyBlogLog.com, another online blog-listing community where you should list your blogs if you haven’t already.

As I’m currently updating my old blogs and developing new ones, I will be checking on all the old favorite blog registrars and trying out new ones. I’ll report back here on the best ones I find.