9 Very Important Wordpress Blog Design Tips

Blog design can have a moderate amount of impact on how your users react to it.  Here are some tips I have learned that can really make a difference in your traffic and how much interest your readers will have when they visit your blog.

1.  Add your subscription options to the end of every post.

This is probably one of the most important things you can do to your blog.  Make sure you always make it as simple as possible for people to subscribe to your RSS feed.  The easiest way I found to do this is to use a Wordpress plugin called Post Footer.  You can download it here. 

If you use feedburner than go into the springwidgets section and get the code for "subscribing in a reader" or get the code for "email subscriptions" or both and add them to the post footer code section.  

Constantly encourage your readers to subscribe.  There are still many people who don’t even know what RSS and subscribing mean, which brings us right into our next tip.

2.  Provide a "What is RSS?" or "Why subscribe?" link on your blog.

I prefer to have it right next to where your subscription options are.  Most blogs offer their RSS subscription options on the top right of their sidebar.  This blog is no different.  To do this in Wordpress, simply create a post explaining all about RSS feeds and subscribing.  Then go into your sidebar.php page and find the code that displays your RSS options and add the link there.  In most themes it should be in the sidebar but may be in header.php.

On my theme I simply added the HTML code to the widget i used to add the Technorati favorite widget to my sidebar just below the subscribe features.

If you have a basic understanding of HTML then is should be no problem.   Here is the code I used:

 <div class="text widget"><a title="What is RSS? Why Subscribe?" href="http://revenuereservoir.com/2008/09/25/how-in-the-hell-do-i-subscribe-to-a-blog/" target="_blank"><b><u>    What is RSS? Why Subscribe?</b></u></a> <p>

 To add this line to your blog simply change the URL in the code to your URL of the post you wrote about RSS.

3.  Create a contact page for your blog.

I noticed there are still many blogs out there that don’t offer any contact information.  The best bloggers in the world all have an easy to access contact form on their blogs.  If your theme is like mine where you have to create it manually, then you can use another Wordpress plugin called cforms II.  Download it here.

It is pretty easy to setup and has many options.  You will need to create a page first called "Contact" or something similar and then create the form how you want it to look. Last you will need to add the form to the page.  You can do it by enabling the forms option icon to your editor tool bar in windows.  It is not as hard as it sounds.  Just read the read me file for cforms II.

4.  Make sure you have adequate navigation and search capabilities on your blog.

There is nothing more annoying than reading a great blog post on a blog and when you go back to try to find it, you can’t.  It could be because there is no archive links, or no search bar, etc.  If you look at my blog you will noticed I have 2 search bars.  One is on top right of the header and the other is right in between the recent posts and categories on the sidebar.

Try to pick a theme that already has great navigate built into it.  This way you won’t have to scour the web for plugins and code to try and do it manually.

5.  Try not to make your blog look too busy.

Don’t over crowd your sidebar or posts with ads and other things that will distract the user from reading the content.  Remember that people come to your blog to find information.  Make sure the information is clear to read and easy to get to.

6.  Check for and resolve broken links.

Check your blog for broken links and repair them.  Over time you be linking to so many places and you never know when the link will all the sudden become unavailable.  Websites are constantly changing.  They may move their site, edit the page, etc that could change the URL. 

So in your mind you may be thinking, "Well Ben, how do I check MY site for broken links?"  From another Wordpress plugin, of course!  Download this plugin.  It is called "Broken Link Checker".

By the way, if you notice any broken links on my blog, please let me know.  Just go to my contact page and drop me a message with the details.

7.  Check your HTML code for errors.

When I first started blogging I used Blogger.  Once I realized Wordpress was the standard for blogging and was much more useful than blogger, I switched.  In order to do that I had to export all of my posts and comments from Blogger into Wordpress.  Little did I know it caused a lot of code errors that I was unaware of.

One day I came across this website from W3C.  It will check your entire blog for html code errors and give you a report.  It will also give you suggestions on how to fix it.  For even more details and tools for your blog check out this website called The Free Country.

The best thing to do is code it right the first time and you won’t have to go back like I did and fix a bunch of errors.

8. If your theme has a featured video section, don’t set it to auto play.

OK, I imagine most people would know this already right?  Not necessarily.  This is a sure fire way to annoy the crap out of your visitors.  Every time they click on a new link it will refresh the page and start the video over.  I did this one time on another site and I got some bad feed back regarding it.

9. Optimize Wordpress and your code for the fastest loading times possible.

Nobody likes to surf a slow website or blog.  Crazy Leaf Design Blog has an excellent list of things you can do to enhance the speed of your Wordpress blog.  Apply all of these tweaks listed on this website to your blog and you should be a big difference in your sites performance.

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