On Blogging Australia

I asked a question yesterday: is there a good business argument for spending a lot of money on a blog theme before the blog can pay for it?

Lani (from cerebralmum.com) replied:

I don’t think that it’s overly necessary. I agree with Meg that it’s all about the content. Content is the only thing that will guarantee you success. The most important thing for me with people’s designs is that it has a clean layout and good navigation.

Having said that, sometimes a really generic theme can do a disservice to a blog. If it lacks an identity, what is it that draws me in once I’ve scanned the post I went there to read? In some cases, that one post is enough to keep me looking, but sometimes people will enter a blog via one of it’s less enticing posts. I think at a minimum, having a header which provides a visual clue as to what can be found is needed. Even better if I see other post titles which grab my attention so that I dig deeper and make a real connection with the blog.

Then again, sometimes I have to “bump into” a blog a couple of times before I realise the value of it.

I think having a fully customise theme, even for the most successful blog, is simply a treat. First and foremost, blogs simply need to “work” for the content.

This got me thinking about how the theme can get in the way of the content. There are some tricks from user centered design (UCD) that work well with blogs:

 Make individual posts findable within your blog
It is easy to argue that UCD doesn’t apply to blog postings - chances are, if you are viewing this blog for the first time, you are following a link - and findability of the next most interesting post after that should just be a matter of scrolling down, right? That is OK if the next posting down is just as interesting to the reader as the last post - but what if it isn’t? You’ve lost them. To make individual posts easily findable within your blog:

• list relevant categories and tags at individual posting level: these will encourage the reader to look at related posts. Better yet, get hold of one of the related posts plugins (Darren Rowse and a lot of other top bloggers use these when displaying individual posts - here is an example)
• make sure navigation links look clickable: clearly identifiable clickable regions are a must for web navigability, and this applies to blogs as well as any other content presentation mechanism. If it is a link, underline it and/or make it blue.
• have a blog-level search engine that works: this is not as silly as it sounds - when I moved domain names for Facibus Reviews the technorati search widget didn’t work because the index was pointing to the posts at the old server address.

Use the power of visual hierarchy
Look at a newspaper - you expect the headline to be the largest font, and to be at the top of each story block. You also expect it to be descriptive of the content that it is grouped with. It works the same in webland - the title should be larger than the text it supports, and the text in turn should fulfil the promise made by the headline. Most blogging platform software does this by default - but you can still force poor visual hierarchy in two ways:

1. By using a theme that buries your headlines (which is easy to fix - if you can’t change the CSS yourself, change the theme).
2. Writing a headline that doesn’t support the text beneath it: if in doubt, I recommend that you read the very good article on writing effective headlines for different audiences over at copyblogger.

Please group things so that the key message is always the easiest to find - which leads me to the next point - keeping the most important stuff above the fold.

Keep the most important stuff above the fold
Think about the newspaper metaphor again: where does the editor put the most important information? On the front page, at the top where it will grab your attention. When a newspaper is folded in half for selling at your newsagent/news stand, it is the information placed above the fold that will attract the attention of a casual browser.

You can do the same with your blog, by putting the key posting of the week at the top of the front page. Zern Liew (co-author of Cubicle Commando) does this with his eicolab blog.

Susie Bright’s theme absolutely gets in the way of the content when read from portable devices. Have you considered how you would find an individual post on your blog if you were new to it? Does your own theme get in the way of the content?