Blog Design Studio

It’s been a busy week for me and I was not able to post anything as I was away for a while. However, all the while I was thinking of doing a series of posts that will help improve the blogs in almost every aspect. I’ll cover everything in this series – blog design, navigation, user interface, various blogging tips, writing etc. In the first post of this series, I’ll touch upon the point of un-cluttering the blog.

What increases the clutter on your blog?

1. Widgets – Widgets increase the clutter on a blog. They sure look shiny, however people are now getting sick of them and ignore them straight away.

2. Sidebar – Sidebars are great way of displaying some amazing content on the blogs. Although, stuffing them with lot of things just leaves it useless. Lot of stuff in sidebar will most likely confuse the readers and thus they will avoid looking at it.

3. Too many images – Images are good as they add to the design of the blog. However, too many unrelated images just don’t look that good. If the blog design requires images, then it’s ok, however putting too many images in a single post is also not the best of the strategy.

Why is it important to unclutter the blog?

1. Reduces the page load time – There is nothing more frustrating for a web surfer than to wait for a page to load. Cluttered blog will always take lots of time to load and that’s a straight negative.

2. Improves readability – Content is the main selling point for any blog and a cluttered blog will always make it difficult for readers to focus on the content itself.

3. Better navigation – Every pixel of the screen is important and instead of wasting so much valuable space, it’ll be good if this space can be better utilized for improving the navigation of the blog.

How to unclutter the blog?

I won’t say that this will completely unclutter your blog and that you should follow all the steps, however the goal of this post is to ensure that you get rid of as much as wasteful stuff from your blog and that you should instead use it for improving the blog in various other ways.

1. Use of Categories – Reduce the number of categories and use tags to broaden the stuff. It’s good to categorize the post, however having too many categories will not serve the purpose well. One should only focus on 15 odd categories and should avoid more categories.

2. Remove meta links – If you have a blog which is authored by you or handful of guys, then I don’t see any point in having the “meta links” in the sidebar, which comes by default in WordPress.

3. Remove widgets – You’ll see many widgets like Mybloglog, BlogCatalog, Technorati profiles and similar stuff, however these things are javascript which take time to load and I can only suggest you to remove them, until you use it to actually market your blog.

4. Remove social media buttons – There are many bloggers who display 10-15 icons of various social bookmarking sites. I don’t see any point in that, I think ShareThis or AddThis buttons are more than enough. They display on one image and give the ability to add to most of the important social bookmarking sites.

5. Remove various feed buttons – Just like social media buttons, it makes sense if one uses standard RSS feed button and instead one should use feedburner and that itself gives various options for a user to subscribe to specific services.

6. Blogrolls are so 2006 – I’ll suggest that one should maintain a blogroll, however having them on each and every page is not required. If someone is really interested in knowing that what links do you like, you can dedicate a single page for that.

7. Visitor counts – Many bloggers use widgets like ClustrMap, Hit counters to show that how many visitors are they getting or from which parts of the world are they getting the visitors. Well, its a wonderful way of showing off, however if you really want to show the real stats, then I would rather prefer to show the number of subscribers through Feedburner chicklets and not the number of visitors I’m getting.

8. Merging important Pages – It makes sense if you have about me, contact us and disclosure policy pages in one page itself. People who would like to contact you, should know that who you are and vice versa. So, if you can include all these pages in one, you’ll save extra space for more important links.

There are many other things which can be easily removed from the blog that will save space for displaying various important links with in your own blog. This will ensure that visitors will be able to go through those posts and will likely subscribe to your blog. Feel free to share your suggestions in comments and tell the world that what exactly you removed from your own blog and why you removed it.