10 quick tips for your blog

Image by lightsight.

Long ago, I published a series of quick tips for your blog over at benbarden.com. However, these were lost in the move to Top Ten Blog Tips, as I couldn't find a way to get each tip into a list of related tips. Then it dawned on me. Why not publish a collection of 10 quick tips that aren't necessarily on the same subject? So here you go!

1. Give every post a decent title

The title you use for your posts is really important. It should give the reader a good idea of what your post is about. It should make them want to read the post.

It can take some time to master how to write good titles. Try to avoid titles that are vague, very long, very short, or that do not relate to the subject of your post.

It may seem like a big joke to write "FREE MONEY" as your post title and follow it up with "Now I've got your attention..." but all this does is mislead, confuse and frustrate your target audience.

You should also try to include some keywords to help people find your blog when using a search engine. What are the keywords you're hoping to target?

2. Write a strong opening paragraph

Every post needs a strong opening paragraph - something that makes the reader want to keep reading.

If you're someone who writes good content every day but you try to write your very best posts every Monday (just to give an example), that doesn't mean you shouldn't write good opening paragraphs for the rest of the week. Remember that the newest post appears at the top of your home page.

It's not just about keeping your existing readers interested - you also want to stop potential readers in their tracks, make them read, and convert them to regular readers. A good opening paragraph in every post will help you do this.

3. Write an even stronger closing paragraph

Sometimes it's good to leave a few points open for comment, either by your readers or in future blog entries. Don't explain every little detail to the point where you get so bogged down, you've forgotten what your point was.

A good closing paragraph might provide an apt conclusion to your post, or it might raise several questions for your readers to ponder. Without a solid closing paragraph, your post is missing that final bit of polish.

4. Use a harmonious colour scheme

When you're trying to decide on a colour scheme for your site, you need to think about which colours go well together. You can't just pick any old colours or your site won't look that great.

Take extra care with the contrast between the text colour and the background colour. A white background with black text may seem boring, but it's widely used because it's easy on the eyes. Tinkering with colours just because you can does not mean your readers will find your content easy to read.

Remember that colour blind users will have severe difficulties reading your site if you use a red/green colour combination. It doesn't look pretty, either!

Fortunately, there is a handy tool that will assist you in finding colours that go well together. Check it out: ColorSchemer - Online Color Scheme Generator. There are others too, but this is my favourite.

Basically, click on a colour you like, and you'll be given a palette of colours that should work well together. Want to make the palette lighter or darker? Simple - just use the "Lighten Scheme" and "Darken Scheme" buttons on the left.

If you want to save the current palette, make a note of the six characters beneath the top left colour - when you first go to the site, you'll see this is #3366FF. Next time you visit the site, enter these six characters into the box on the left-hand side, and click Set Hex.

Ah, but how do you use the colours? That's something for a proper tutorial - if you're interested, leave me a comment and I'll see what I can do.

5. Don't go font crazy

When you're choosing fonts for your site, be careful not to use anything too fancy. The fonts on your computer may not exist on the computers of your visitors. This is rather frustrating as it limits you to a small number of fonts. (I've looked at fonts before - here's a list of 10 fonts and what they say about your blog.)

Here are some of the ones you can use:

Arial
Arial Narrow
Courier
Courier New
Georgia
Tahoma
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana

However, the choices are different depending on your operating system - visitors who use a Mac rather than a PC with Windows will probably see things quite differently.

Perhaps the best idea is to keep it simple. If you wish, choose one font for your headers and one for your content, and possibly a different one in your logo or banner. But you shouldn't use more than three different fonts on your site. Two is probably best. Anything else just looks messy.

6. Use your own banner

Your blogging software may have a wide range of themes to choose from, or it may have a limited set. The problem is that any generic theme has almost certainly been used by hundreds of other sites already. Using generic themes will not help your site to stand out.

At the very least, use your own banner at the top to show that the site is yours and not just another site with a blue background at the top.

If you need help, you could always try asking in the CMF Forums.

7. Use heading styles - don't just make the text bigger

Quite often I see blogs that break up paragraphs with bold text. Sometimes the text is made to look like a header, but it isn't one. Search engines will pay more attention to headers than bold text, and headers will look better than bold text if a visitor has styles disabled, or if they're using a device that doesn't support stylesheets.

When writing a post, look for a drop down list that has a paragraph style and heading styles. I use Heading 2 for subheadings within a post, and Heading 1 for the title at the top of the page (usually the title of your blog).

8. Don't rely too heavily on scripts

Some sites have all sorts of fancy things on their sites. Some people think they look "cool". But the more things you put on your site, the longer it takes to load.

A big mistake here is to forget that not all browsers support every possible thing you could add to your site. Worse still, different browsers often handle things in different ways, especially with scripts - so what works for you in Internet Explorer might not work for me in Firefox.

Ask yourself if your blog is for you or for other people. Do you want people to come and read your site, post comments, and link to it? If you do, reduce your clutter. Seriously, you don't need all those bits and pieces in your sidebar. They just slow down the site and make it painful to use.

9. Use a full feed

If a reader wants to subscribe to your site, don't screw them with a partial feed. Show the entire contents of your post in the feed. Otherwise, why bother subscribing?

10. Resize images offline

Digital cameras are great. However, most cameras store very large images when they capture a photo. This can be changed, but I'd actually suggest using a large photo size on the camera itself. If you take an excellent photo at a small size, you won't be able to increase the size. You can only decrease it. So make the photos as big as you can when you're taking them.

It's a different story when you get to your computer, though. Some photos may be very wide, very tall, and have a very large file size. You need to resize the image and save it under a different name so you don't overwrite the original.

Some sites will nicely resize images for you, but some won't, and that's where the problems occur. I've seen so many images on the web that are ridiculously oversized. It's painful to try and browse through someone's photo gallery when they're all such huge files.

A common misconception is that you can use HTML to resize an image. Let's say you have an image that is 1500 pixels square and 2MB in file size. Many people would upload this huge image to the web and try to resize it using the following code:



Although this will display a 200x200 version of the image, your browser still has to load the original 2MB file. Don't do this! Resize it in a graphics package or upload it to a site that automatically resizes it for you. Then display it on your blog. And if you're using images from Flickr, save the image locally as the file size could probably be reduced. Upload it to your blog instead of linking directly to the Flickr image. If Flickr goes down but you've got the image on your blog, it'll still show up in your post.

Just make sure the photos you download have a licence that allows this kind of usage. Try Flickr Creative Commons if you need some images.

So, that's 10 quick tips for your blog! Did you find this post useful? Would you like to see a follow-up?