Buzz Marketing with Blogs: Blogher Panel: Blog Design

Blogher Panel: Blog Design

These are my notes from the morning session at Blogher:

Design isn’t just about looks – it’s about information presentation that makes sense. What’s interesting with blog design is that there is a different dynamic than from Web design, much less print design.

Lynda Keeler, creator of delight.com, spoke about creating several versions of the site, working her way through brand identity issues. She used Typepad because it is fast and easy, plus easy to post to. (She’s now migrating to Movable Type.) She set out to create a lot of images to break up the type and visually identify the blog. Her first attempt was very straightforward. As the blog became successful and got visitors, she redesigned to accommodate advertising. She went to about a thousand blogs and worked with a graphic designer to find the best layout for delight.com.

The next stage will be to recast delight.com as a way to share information not only from this blog, but from other blogs she has created. The plan is a site that gets information out there quickly, but gives prominent placement to advertising space.

She makes the point that blog design is about defining your own goals for your blog; each design solution needs to be unique. Plus, design revisions should shift as your goals and ideas for the blog change.

The important elements of design are:

knowing your goals
understanding your audience

Keep your topic in mind when thinking about your design. Don’t forget to plan for growth, and for a shift in direction, to the extent that’s possible.

Take a look at other blogs, especially those that have topics and audience in common with yours, for ideas and inspiration.

It’s key to remember that blogs are something that get visited daily, even hourly, and because of that usability and layout are critical. Create consistency so that your visitors know what’s new and hot; think about setting off that content with colored backgrounds, for instance.

Don’t forget that bandwidth is still an issue for a lot of people. Faster downloads mean happier visitors! Use text as a graphic element – colors, sizing, and style can make text pop in the way graphics do.

Lynda advises that dark backgrounds sometimes equal less legibility. The same is true for very small text, especially when you have an older audience.

Use pullquotes to set off a section of your text and give it emphasis, as in this section of this post.

Break your posts up into short paragraphs. This doesn’t mean you can’t write long posts, just that you should break them up.

Take a look at your site stats to get information about your visitors and what their technological setup is, especially screen resolution. Sitemeter and StatCounter are both free stat resources you can implement on your blog.

Gina Hughes blogs on Techie Diva’s Guide to Gadgets. To create the Web site she hired a designer to help design the brand.

While finding a designer, she looked for work that resembled her vision and ideas. The designer created an illustration that served as the only customization of the blog for three months. As she grew her audience, Gina reworked the design to reflect softness and femininity, with a welcoming feel for women and even for kids.

Recently she revised the design again to get a little edgier, adding more black and bright pink.

She advises you do your homework when you get started. Investing in design conveys that your site is credible, that it has potential, and will grow. Design can reflect your authority, personality, identity, and style.

I asked about how you rationalize spending money on design when many of your readers read your blog via RSS feeds and may not ever make it to your Web site. Gina said that design was important since many blog readers are a) unaware that they are even on a blog and b) not using RSS at all.

Lynda answered by saying that you should address this issue by writing compelling post titles that get people to click through to your blog – and then they’ll see your design.

A big topic of discussion was about whether there needed to be a differentiation between a Web site and a blog.

One suggestion from Heather Parish was for bloggers with smaller budgets and time is to do as much as you can with your blogging software’s built-in design customization (font colors, etc.) and to maybe just pay for (beg, barter, steal?) a custom banner to put on the top of the blog.

Gina Hughes followed up by saying that her design evolution followed the growth of the site; design spending scaled up as the site became more successful, though she also took full advantage of Typepad’s customization tools.

Mindy (The Mommy Blog) talked about the need to pay for design in order to build a brand so that she can be unique.

Staci Kramer of OJR asked about the key features of a blog that should be regarded as completely necessary: search, email this, and…? Becky Walters said that a print this feature is also key.

Techiegirl has links and resources if you want to learn more about blog design.

Incidentally, the wifi was down for all but the first few minutes of this presentation, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to post this. Kudos to Lynda and Gina for adapting in the face of not being to access and show their blogs!

P.S. If you’re looking for blog design, I might be able to help you with that.

Tags: blogher, bloghercon

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/30 at 12:02 PM • A Little Design -- Blogging Events