One of my new, favorite bloggers Heidi Cohen has these thoughts on blog design for you to ponder…
Writers at heart, many bloggers rush through selecting their blog design elements without much thought when they first start. But the reality is that design is core to your blog’s brand and readership. Therefore, out-of-the box blog set-ups most likely won’t work for you.
Blog design doesn’t require artistic training. It requires strategic (read: high level) thought, determining your blog’s goals and target audience (aka: persona) before you jump in and start blogging.
Review the blogs you read frequently to become familiar with your options. Consider which blogs you like and which elements of those blogs attract your attention. Make a list of those elements you want and those that you don’t want.
Here are twenty-one blog design elements that you don’t have to be a graphic designer to select…
Go to the source if you are interested in her 21 elements. Me? Through a long and rigorous evaluation process, I have decided to become a Woo Themes developer. I won’t bore you with the details of my search, but it literally lasted years. Woo offers over 100 themes that look good ‘out of the box’ but are also very easy for me to customize to a client’s specifications…
Heidi’s right! Much more important than the design is the actual strategy. Adam Osborne said “Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous” and I agree. When it comes to design, I believe a tweaked Woo theme may be all you need – as I tell my clients, ‘Google doesn’t search for pretty’. I focus instead on delivering to my clients a system or toolkit with a repeatable process that is easy to use based on the premise that if it’s easy and fun to do, they might actually do it. On the back end, I have been working hard this year to link my ‘e1evation workflow’ more deeply to the value demands of my target audience by linking keywords to the problems my target audience is trying to solve. If you use a repeatable process like mine for your blogging and use a Woo theme for your site, you will draw your target audience in and the design won’t scare them away!
Heidi’s thoughts on determining your blog’s goals and target audience are must read before getting started — comment or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to you and your organization…
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- The Top 25 WordPress Themes Of 2011 (noupe.com)
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Todd Lohenry 