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Having a blog on your website is a great way to generate traffic. Sharing these posts on social media catches user’s attention and ring them in right to your site. If your content is good, they will share it to their own followers and so on.
But there are some rookie mistakes that you need to fix in order to have an attractive blog that is share worthy. Your content may be amazing and you may have scheduled your posts at researched peak times in order to get the most traffic, but if the design is annoying and distracting then really, you’re going to loose out big time.
Here are some things that you should NOT do on your blog, and if you do, you need to fix them now!
Don’t Have a Confusing Structure that is Hard to Read
Make sure that the structure is neat and clean, don’t have annoying advertisements popping up, or overly big images on the page that take attention away from the text.
Don’t Have an Ugly Colour Scheme
Of course all colours are beautiful, BUT, there are certain colours that do not go well together. And when you’re reading a blog post, you want to be interested enough to read it instead of turned off by the bad colour scheme.
Don’t Have all of your Content in the one Paragraph
Break up the text into small, readable paragraphs. No one wants to read a blog that is all text. It looks boring and people will get a headache just looking at it.
You should think about using headings to break up paragraphs, maybe break up the text with some nice colourful visuals.
You also need to think about the font of your text. This is a big deal in the design world as there are popular fonts and not so popular fonts. It’s a bit like high school, if one font is ugly then everyone will ignore it (too mean? Not in blogging). Make your font a popular one, and make it a decent size.
Your links are also very important. You don’t just have to make sure that you’ve linked properly and to the correct page, but they need to be clickable. Make sure they are brightly coloured, or bold, or underlined. Or all if you’re in a good mood. Just made sure that they stand out from all other text.
Don’t use Blurry Images
These are a huge big fat no no in blogging. You need to have high quality, professional looking images, all the time.
Honestly, if you have nothing nice to show then it’s better not to show anything at all.
Don’t Have Your Blog Only Viewable on Internet Explorer
Like, does anyone even use internet explorer? Bloggers do apparently. The amount of times I’ve been in chrome and tried to read a blog but it wouldn’t work is ridiculous. And annoying. And out of spite I just didn’t read the blog.
So, moral is, make sure your blog is available on different web browsers too including chrome, Firefox and safari. Don’t forget about mobile browsers too.
What Not To Do On Your Blog
Another few tips to remember is to always make sure your search bar is easy to locate on the page, have it in the header or the side bar area.
Make sure you have clear sharing buttons on your posts, and make sure that your contact details are all there and easy to find. Don’t use annoying pop up adverts,
Don’t have an auto play video or music on your blog, and if you do have the default sound to off so that if someone genuinely wants to watch or listen, they are given the choice instead of being given a heart attack when random voices come through the speaker when they are just wanting a quiet read at your blog.
If you follow all of these don’t’s. then I am sure you will have a brilliant blog and I for one would enjoy reading it.