Remarkablogger

First Impressions Matter

After focusing on the first key, content production, the next important key to better blogging is to have a better blog design. Having readers of your blog who subscribe to RSS feeds is a wonderful, wonderful thing, but probably everybody who subscribed visited your blog “in person” at least once beforehand. Blog design matters, because you want to make the best first impression possible. That first impression means the difference between a visitor staying or leaving.

Your Blog is Your Personal Brand

For many people, blog design means choosing a template, moving some widgets around, and maybe changing the heading image and font colors. What are you communicating to visitors through your blog’s color scheme, graphics, and typography? You may not be out get rich online, but your blog is still the biggest, most visible representation online of your personal brand. Companies have a brand, for which they pay millions to nurture in the marketplace. You can spot anything from Starbucks a mile away because their branding is so strong. People are the same way. Your personality, your writing or speaking style, what you choose for subject matter, and how your blog looks are all elements of your personal brand online.

Matching Your Blog to Your Personal Brand

If you’ve never considered what you want your personal brand to be, then the first thing that you need to do determine the characteristics of your personal brand. Then you need to design or source a design that expresses those characteristics which match your personal brand as closely as possible. One of the problems with existing WordPress themes or Blogger templates is that they may not be a good match for your personal brand. If you cannot design your own template, and you cannot afford to pay someone to design it, then you will simply have to make do with free themes and templates. It is often less expensive to pay a designer to modify an existing template than to craft one anew. Take your time on this process, it’s important to choose a good design. Ask your friends to help you. Show them some contenders and ask them: “Does this look like me?” Don’t expect universal agreement, but do get a second opinion. After staring at hundreds of blog themes, you can lose your sense of perspective about what you thought you wanted.

Your Feedback is Desired

Leave a comment with a link back to a post or your blog you wrote after you read this. Tell me how you applied these concepts to the post or to your blog. At the end of this series, I’m going to pick the best examples and link to them. So please leave a comment below and subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss the rest of them! Tomorrow is key 3: Blog SEO.