Common Mistakes That New Bloggers Make

Common Mistakes That New Bloggers Make – Web Design

Filed in Blogging, New Websites on Jun.15, 2010 By Keith Lunt

It is quite easy for a new blogger to get carried away with their new website and completely make a mess of their blog. Even if you are working from the free theme, there is still a large danger of a few mistakes making it go wrong. Read this guide to avoid simple mistakes.

Even if you are using a theme, a blogger is going to personalise the new blog in a few ways to make the design the way they want it to look. But, this is where the design can go wrong in a big way for users of WordPress, by doing nothing!

How many blogs have I seen that say “Just another WordPress blog.” Go through the options of your new blog and check for that now – get it looking right straight from the start!

As for actual design errors, one of the first elements of the page design that many bloggers are playing with is some advertising. It is always nice to earn a little extra cash from your blog, whether it is just a hobby or intended as a money making system. So adding a few affiliate banners, Google Adsense blocks and so on is quite common. And you are allowed 3 Adsense blocks, a Google search block and more.

This means that the temptation is to throw a large add unit into the post and a few around the sides along with scattered half relevant affiliate banners. But this is a huge mistake. Look at professional sites and you will notice that they keep their advertising to a few key positions. By having advertising everywhere readers must wade through the adverts to find the content. This is not what they want. The average reader wants to find the content, not feel as though they are only wanted for their monetary value to you.

So to avoid the over advertising mistake, just keep adverts to one or two positions and include only those adverts that do really well.

The next design mistake is to have broken links. Not only are these bad for search engines, but they annoy readers. Yet they are simple to detect. If you are using WordPress look for a broken link plugin that suits your way of working, install it and fix those links. Broken links lose your credibility very quickly.

Still with navigation, the opposite is also true – not linking enough. Most blog themes will show a list of your recent posts, but that is not always what new readers want to see. They want to see your best and most popular writing. So get hold of a plugin to help you display most popular posts – either by the most read or the most commented. Also, link to related posts so that when a reader has finished the current post they have something else to go onto. This means that new visitors are steered around your site, staying on it for longer and maybe becoming regular followers.

Lastly, don’t get carried away with your post titles. Remember that some readers might be going through your RSS feed and all that they see about your new post is the start of its title. Make it good so that they click the title to read the post. If the titles are meaningless, they will very quickly delete your RSS feed from their reader.