Importance of Design
Since turning I’m Blogging That into something other than my personal blog, I’ve wanted to reinvent myself with personal blogging and naturally my source to do that was at Raise It, Clean It, Blog it where I initially thought that I would just blog about my daughter’s daily life.
To reinvent myself there as a personal blogger (along with my many other talents) I decided that a new blog design was in order.
And yesterday, when I completed my hot design from Mindy’s awesome template I got to thinking about blog design in general.
What does it matter to you, as a visitor of blogs and websites, how a website looks?
Personally speaking, I really can’t stay at a site too long where I find navigating confusing or the design harsh on my eyes or just bad in general.
And each time Mindy codes something for Kiss My Code that is absolutely amazing, I’m compelled to redesign if for only the sake of using whatever she has created.
Today, my thoughts were reconfirmed with a post about the importance of the location of your RSS feed subscription link. And I realized I’m Blogging That doesn’t really have the best placement for RSS and probably never has.
On most sites, blogs anyway, you’ll find this link near the top and in your face. It’s helpful for me as someone who subscribes to every feed when I like just one single post from a blog.
So once you’ve gotten past locating RSS for the site what else is important? If you organize your site in order of importance how should your sidebar(s) flow?
Here’s my thoughts of order of importance and there just may be a template in use at I’m Blogging That to accommodate my design and information importance.
- RSS: Get more subscribers!
- Quick About: Throw something brief at me about you as the author so that as a first time visitor, I have a little background information on who’s talking to me. For multiple authored site, I like a full page about the authors so that I can reference their knowledge and experience for writing such a blog post.
- Navigation: Where’s your contact, about, archives, blogroll/links pages? I want to hit those up before I leave to make sure I’ve gotten all the important information about your site and see who you, as a person recommend for reading.
- MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog: I really do love these little picture things placed on websites to acknowledge my visit there even if I have chosen not to leave a comment.
So, with my list there, I ask you what’s important for you when visiting a website or blog? What do you enjoy seeing and what do you hate?
