Designing a Page That Complements Your Content
Many of us dream of going boldly where no man has gone before. In the blog world, that’s done with content – creating a unique contribution to the blogosphere that readers will return to again and again.
In some areas, however, it’s safer to follow the well-worn path, sort of like following the Oregon Trail across the Old American West. Someone found the best way to cross the plains and many others succeeded only because they followed in those muddy ruts. The hard work was done, and the important stuff lay on the other side of the mountains. It would have been foolish for a greenhorn to try to seek a new pass through the mountains simply because others had already established one. So it is with developing the look of your blog, at least when you are getting started. Of course, once you are a seasoned explorer, you’ll want to seek out the newer and better paths that others overlook.
Earlier you chose the kind of Blog Empire you were going to establish, so now it’s time to take a look at a few other blogs that have successfully made the trek you’re setting out on. We’re only going to look at the best (i.e. most successful) blogs to start with, though you’ll eventually want to follow a few blog rings to snatch up ideas that can help you build your site into all it can be.
If you haven’t already done so, do a web search using you favorite search engine, looking for the Top 100 blogs. It doesn’t really matter how you search, just that you find blogs that have proven themselves in the eyes of readers and other bloggers, because there are many ways to measure the top: by traffic, by number of other blogs that link, even by awards. You’ll eventually want to search them all.
Now take a look at their layouts, their colors, their images. Focus especially on blogs that resemble yours in content. How do they deal with long posts? How do they link documents? Do they have a list of previous entries? What does their masthead look like? How many columns do they have across the page, including links? These questions are important, not because you’ll be copying (you won’t), but because there are certain layout standards your readers will expect to see, just like you expect that all daily newspapers will share a similar format.
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