It is quite straightforward for a new blogger to get carried away with their new web site and completely make a mess of their weblog. Although you are working from the free theme, there is still a large danger of some mistakes making it go wrong. Read this guide to stay away from simple mistakes.
Although you are using a theme, a blogger is going to personalise the new blog in several ways to make the layout the way they want it to look. But, this is where the layout can go wrong in a big way for users of WordPress, by doing nothing!
How loads of blogs have I seen that say “Just another WordPress blog.” Look through the options of your new blog and check for that now - get it looking right straight from the start!
As for actual design errors, one of the first elements of the page design that many bloggers are playing with is a few advertising. It is always nice to earn a little extra cash from your site, whether it is just a hobby or intended as a cash making system. So adding several affiliate banners, Google Adsense blocks and so on is quite common. And you are allowed 3 Adsense blocks, a Google search block and more.
This means that the temptation is to throw a large add unit into the post and some around the sides along with scattered half relevant affiliate banners. But this is a huge mistake. Look at professional web-sites and you will notice that they keep their advertising to several key positions. By having advertising everywhere readers must wade through the adverts to find the content. This is not what they want. The average reader wants to find the content, not feel as even if they are merely wanted for their monetary value to you.
So to avoid the more than advertising mistake, just keep adverts to one or two positions and include merely those adverts that do really well.
The next design mistake is to have broken links. Not only are these bad for search engines, but they annoy readers. Yet they are easy to detect. If you are using WordPress look for a broken link plugin that suits your way of working, install it and fix those links. Broken links lose your credibility very quickly.
Still with navigation, the opposite is also true - not linking enough. Most blog themes will show a selection of your recent posts, but that is not always what new visitors want to see. They want to see your best and most popular writing. So get hold of a plugin to help you display most popular posts - either by the most read or the most commented. Also, link to related posts so that when a reader has finished the current post they have something else to go onto. This means that new traffic are steered round your site, staying on it for longer and possibly becoming regular followers.
Lastly, don’t get carried away with your post titles. Remember that several readers might be going through your RSS feed and all that they see around your new post is the start of its title. Make it good so that they click the title to read the post. If the titles are meaningless, they will very quickly delete your RSS feed from their reader.
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Written by Keith Lunt, who offers a web design Formby service. For more useful tips, call into the internet marketing blog .
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