The 7 Most Dangerous Blog Design Mistakes

The 7 Most Dangerous Blog Design Mistakes

119 Comments / Blogging Tutorials, Guest Posts / By /

First impressions are so important to good blog design.

The experts say that you only have about 7 seconds to motivate a new visitor to stick around, and start reading your blog (or a sales letter for that matter as well).

And 7 seconds might even be a bit generous really. It is realistic to say that you have only about 3 seconds for some people. As soon as the page loads, a decision is made instantly by the visitor if the page is worthy of attention or not.

Too much choice for web surfers

7 Dangerous Blog Design MistakesThere are many millions of blogs on the internet, and probably about 98% of them are garbage to be honest. And because there is so much choice out there, it is very hard to stand out – unless you can “WOW” a first time visitor with a great design, interesting content and also plenty of engagement.

Probably the best way to get loads of traffic and engagement to your blog is simply to have people make repeat visits, and come back on a regular basis for more.

Just like repeat customers make a business, repeat visitors create a community like atmosphere on a blog and it is your job to do your very best to turn those visitors into loyal readers.

If you are going to create a blog and take it seriously, then make sure you avoid these 7 blog design mistakes below.

1. Sidebars cluttered with banners, links, and other meaningless items.

Of all the blog design mistakes, this is the one that I see the most. This is where most people get the rules of good web design wrong.

For a start only have one sidebar, as two sidebars make a blog look way too busy. In my opinion the best layout is to have the content section on the left with a sidebar on the right. Take a look at the layout on this page of Basic Blog Tips for a clear picture of what I mean.

I studied many of the big name bloggers out there, and almost all of them have a similar layout to this.

And the other thing about sidebars is that most people put far too many advertising banners on them. This just puts people off as everybody knows that you are trying to make money from these banners. The other amusing thing is that unless you are getting barrel loads of traffic, you will be lucky to make a few dollars a month from them.

I would limit it to only one or two banners in the sidebar, and only one banner for the header and content section of your blog.

2. Using bizarre colored fonts and backgrounds

Some people disagree with me here, but in my opinion you should always use a white background and keep it simple. A lot of blogs use dark backgrounds with white text, and then there are others that use pretty colors trying to brighten the site up.

The professional bloggers all use white backgrounds with black text, and for good reason. People are used to reading newspapers and books with these colors, so it really should be no different with your website.

Use colors for your headings or links only.

Recommended reading:

3. Too many toolbars, pop ups, widgets or any other annoying special features

A pop up is ok for the first time a reader gets to your site (I use one myself), but don't install pop ups to appear every time they click on a new page – that is a sure way to annoy your reader.

With the huge selection of free plugins available, it is tempting for a newbie blogger to have things popping up everywhere – and a few toolbars as well. But ask yourself, do you really think these gadgets impress your visitors – or contribute to more subscribers and sales?

I don't think so.

The less distractions you put on your blog the better – remember the saying “keep it simple stupid”.

4. The visitor is confused about what the main blog topic is.

In the header of this blog you can clearly read “Basic Blog Tips”, which immediately tells readers what the blog is about. There is no confusion here, people know straight away exactly what content to expect.

As soon as a blogger visits this website, they immediately know that they are in the right place for learning how to build a better blog.

5. The blogger has no idea what they are actually trying to achieve with the blog

Has the blog been created to generate you leads, sell your products, pay you via advertising or to improve your credibility? It may be a combination of these things, but the point is to be crystal clear on the desired outcome of the blog.

Once you are clear on what the primary purpose of the blog is, you can start to implement tactics and strategy to achieve these objectives.

A classic example is a blog that has been primarily created to generate leads. The idea should be to think of as many ways as possible to encourage people to opt into your list, without going overboard.

Use clever tactics to motivate people to do what you want them to do, but make sure that you don't cheat them or lie to them. Under promise and over deliver and you should not have any problems.

6. It is difficult to navigate around your blog and find things.

Some websites make it very difficult to find what you are looking for and have very poor navigation. It can get really frustrating if things don't work the way they should, or if links are broken.

Personally, I prefer to only show a teaser of my recent blog posts on the home page as I am able to feature a lot more content on there – rather than just having entire blog posts shown one after the other down the page.

A well designed blog will always make navigation as easy as possible, and a great theme goes a long way towards improving your navigation and blog search. The two themes that almost all professional bloggers choose from are either Thesis or Genesis. I personally use Thesis because it is very easy to customize the blog to look exactly how you want it to look.

Another very important element of designing a great blog is to make sure that you put share buttons floating on each blog post, either on the left or right hand side. I use a plugin called Digg Digg and select the floating option on my website.

Digg Digg is very easy to set up and install and the floating option means that no matter how far the reader scrolls down, the share buttons are always visible. Look to your left now, and you will see these share buttons I am talking about.

Watch Ms. Ileane's video: How To Install The Digg Digg Sharebar Plugin for WordPress

7. Slow loading pages… (Yawn!)

Another important factor is to make sure the speed of your blog is not slow when clicking from one page to the next. Because if it is, you will more than likely lose a lot of readers.

People just don't have the patience to wait for web pages that “hang” for long periods. I know I certainly don't, do you?

Some people tell you to install special cache plugins to make your pages load faster, but after trying these myself I found that my site actually ran slower. And on top of that they were extremely complicated for the average user to understand what the settings were about.

They are varying opinions on cache plugins though, as some people swear that they couldn't live without them. A popular plugin is W3 Total Cache if you want to give it a try, and see for yourself.

One plugin that I would recommend you to try is P3 – Plugin Performance Profiler which shows you which plugins are taking the longest to load, and also how long each individual one is taking. See the image below to see what I mean.pluginloadtime

 

Another useful plugin that improves speed is WP Smush.it . This plugin reduces image file sizes and improves performance by compressing all of your images. It's also important to have a fast and reliable web host.

Ms. Ileane recommends using HostGator.

In conclusion keep your blog simple, don't overdo it with advertising and become clear on what the primary purpose of the blog is, and you will be well on your way to create a great blog that people love to visit.

Just being aware of these blog design mistakes will give you a huge advantage.

Here are some links to A-Grade blogs to give you an idea of how the professional bloggers set up their site. You should be able to see many things in common with all of these blogs if you look carefully. See how many you can spot.

What are you doing to improve your blog design? Have you tested your blog's page load speed recently?

119 thoughts on “The 7 Most Dangerous Blog Design Mistakes”

  1. Enstine Muki

    Hey Scott,
    That’s an important topic to talk about as we know design is one of the key factors that either keep people on your blog or kick them off so soon.

    I think a simple and fast loading blog is the winner. More of us trying to generate income from our blogs go beyond the limit. Ads everywhere with the sidebars suffering from overloads. I love airy blogs 😉

    It’s terrible to wait for minutes just for a page to load. It kills your time and interest to read that article. People generally don’t have time to wait. The slowness of web pages also have negative effects on SEO.

    BTW, thanks for mentioning P3 – Plugin Performance Profiler. I never heard of it before. Going to check it out right away

    Hope you are having a great week

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Enstine,

      I agree with everything you have said there. And the P3 – Plugin Performance Profiler is definitely worth checking out to see which plugins are slowing down your website.

  2. Emma

    Very cognate observation made there. I usually get confused when I visit some sites, so I made sure that I would not make that same mistake again. thanks for sharing this info Dudley.

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Emma, yes it is easy to get confused when going to a lot of websites out there. Like I said 98% of websites online are garbage. Thanks for the comment.

  3. Shalu Sharma

    Absolutely spot on that 98% of sites are garbage. I too think that there is a lot of clutter on the sidebars on most sites and not to mention the slow loading pages. Thanks for the A list blogs.

      1. Shalu Sharma

        Scott, is that your blog as I don’t remember. When was this? If that is the case then I must make a point to come back and comment.

  4. Okto

    Hi Scott,

    Those are important points to avoid on blog design.

    I like on what you said about side bar clutters. No one will want to spend time on our blog if it’s cluttered with too much information, images, text, and so on. A visitor to our blog will only spend a few seconds viewing our page in order to make the decision to continue reading or click away. Make sure it’s easy to find our valuable content quickly. Cluttered sidebars, posts overflowing with links, and so on make it difficult to find the meaningful content amidst the extraneous elements.

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Okto,

      I mentioned the cluttered sidebars because I know I used to do this in the past, and have experienced how people react to it. My motto these days is to keep it simple, and focus only the desired end result of why the blog exists (ie generating leads, attracting clients etc).

  5. Lisa

    I could not agree with you more Scott on the those sidebars filled with ads and promotions. It’s overhwelming. The same for popups, I’ve read they generate more leads, etc but I don’t like them popping out at me 🙂 I haven’t clicked on any.

    I do not agree with the share buttons on the side for one reason- mobile. I used to have mine on the side (they look great there) but when I visited my own posts and others you could not always read them with the DiggDigg on the side so I’ve put mine below now. So many more people are reading via mobile these days. The ones on this blog look smaller, maybe that is key now?

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Lisa,

      Some good points. Your right about a lot of people using mobile devices and the floating share buttons getting in the way. I didn’t think of that. Personally I use a laptop 90% of the time, but it’s clear that most people prefer mobile devices.

      The point is though that you should give people a chance to share your content, without making the content unreadable.

  6. Mitch

    Hi Scott, nice article and I agree with one of your point that visitor get confused about what is the main blog topic, because I’ve seen many site where we get confused which one is the latest article. Great article dude.

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Mitch,

      Yep avoid confusion at all costs, or you will lose people quickly ( and they won’t come back). Thanks for the comment.

  7. shiv

    I am agree with you. You have explained very clearly. But i am confused with plugins which is useful which one not. I am confused please post some important plugin deatils.

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Shiv, I recommend that you try all of the plugins that I have mentioned, except for W3 TotalCache. Some love this plugin, but I don’t use it because it slows my blog down in my opinion. Thanks for the comment.

  8. Sourav

    Hello Scott,
    You have made some great points here. One thing that irritates me the most when I visit some blog are the unwanted popups for ads. A few days ago I visited a blog where I just couldn’t close the popup in order to read the article….it was a popup for some advertisement (not an opt-in form).
    Another thing I noticed is that as soon as I start to scroll down, some ad pillars crawl in from the sides….oh that horrible!!
    Bizarre background…not only they look odd and harsh, but they take a huge amount of time to load.

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Sourav,

      Yes some people go over the top with all of this junk advertising. These types of websites should really be banned. Thanks for the comment.

  10. Martin

    You know, to avoid all these awful mistakes, better to go for already crafted design. Ready made templates and themes can be a great alternative to it)

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Martin,

      Yes you have a point, but if you do that your website looks like hundred’s of other people’s sites. I like customizing my own site to look different, but at the same time this would be a good solution for those that want to make it quick and easy. Thanks for hte comment.

  11. Joseph

    The plugin performance profiler is a good tip. Very useful.

    I may need to rethink my site’s tagline as it is too abstract.

    A well-thought out post!

  12. myles

    Making the template of your page to be too monotonous is bad, and also making the color too vibrant is proved to bring worse results. P.S. i have tried it on my blog.

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Myles,

      Good point, I always say a happy medium is best. But, at the end of the day your content is far more important than the design anyway.

  13. himanshu

    hey Scott
    Thanks for writing this post for us.I fully agree with you.I frequently post about wordpress theme on my blog.I always try to post those themes which will give benefit to the readers.The best thing which i recommend to newbie blogger is to choose readymade theme from the market and install on their blog.Not to use to many adsense in between post.

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Himanshu,

      Yes for a newbie I would agree with you. I’m not a fan of Adsense either, but I know that some people are having success with it. Thanks for the comment.

  14. Darek Kargul

    Hey Scott, this was a great article, I have to thank you for sharing the ” P3 – Plugin Performance Profiler”, I just installed it and I really love it.

    Thanks to this plugin I found out that the plugin impact on my site speed is nearly 60% which equals to approximately 0.8s, I didn’t know plugins were slowing my blog so much, I’m gonna have to spend some time and figure out what’s unneeded for me.

    Thanks again!

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hey Derek,

      Yep it’s a great plugin. I’m glad you like it. Any plugin that you don’t need that is slowing down your site should be removed. It is definitely an eye opener. Thanks for the comment.

  15. Daniel

    indeed, i admit that is really bizzare when i read the content of a blog whose template design colors are reversed, i.e., white writing instead of black one. it looks like i get confined in a darker place when seeing black background.

  16. Reneé Klein

    Hi Scott,

    I really agree with you, in anything we’re doing, first impression matters a lot and we just have to be mindful of that. When a visitor visits your site for the first time, the look of site is the first thing that will determine if he stays or not so, we all should be careful with our sites design. In as much as we want to have the best, lets not forget to keep it simple. Thanks

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hey Renee,

      Yeah, you’re right. There is so much competition out there we have to do our best to make a good first impression. Thanks for the comment.

  17. Rohan Mod

    good post, agreed with point no.2 ,the mistake that i made was , i filled my sidebar with many ads and other javascript which increased the page loading speed of my blog and i started loosing traffic then i removed everything and just using few post related widgets.
    Thanks for sharing with us because blog design plays an important role in search results i felt that it is good to aware others .

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Rohan,

      Yeah a couple of ads in the sidebar is more than enough. The more things you have going on, the slower it takes to load the page. Thanks for the comment.

  18. Samuel

    Excellent article that many of these bloggers need to take note of, including myself!

    I am a person who is a loud advocate of having your best design to your blog.

    Design is very important to a new visitor and there are certain elements that bloggers make that are similar to the points in this article.

    They need to fix that asap!

    Great job there Scott 🙂

    Samuel from Internet Dreams

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Samuel,

      Yeah, your blog design is really a reflection on your business. It doesn’t need to be anything dramatic, but it must come across as being professional. Thanks for the comment.

  19. Sallie Goetsch

    I would argue that #5 is a fundamental mistake for any website, but not actually a DESIGN mistake. Not knowing what your purpose is will almost certainly lead you to make poor design choices, though if you have no goals, it is hard to decide whether your design supports them!

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Sallie,

      Yes, you’re right – but it is was still worth mentioning. And as you say, a lack of goals will make it hard to get the design right. Thanks for the comment.

  20. Tony Nguyen

    I really enjoy reading this articles Scott, I agree on most of your points, especially the idea that bloggers should keep their background white, which I now recognized that for some reasons, it is easiser for me to read. Thanks for the list of A-grade blogs and plugins, I think they are very useful for me as a blogger.

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Tony,

      The white background is a must. Anything else looks strange and is hard to read. I’m glad you enjoyed the list of plugins and blogs. Thanks for the comment.

  21. Sarah

    Hi Scott,

    It was great read and will help many of the bloggers to avoid these type mistakes, as you said in your first line. “First impression is the last impression.”

  22. mohammed kalimulla

    Hi Scott,

    Very important article thank you for tell The 7 Most Dangerous Blog Design Mistakes henceforth onward I will see that I am doing any mistake or not thanks for your advice.

  23. Fahad Zahid

    Hi Scott,

    Absolutely Fantastic post; bang on target. Page Loading Time is one of the most important factor which often neglected by many bloggers and web masters.

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Fahad,

      I agree, page loading time can be a major problem for a lot of people. People don’t have the patience to wait anymore. Thanks for the comment.

  24. Sudipto

    Hey Scott,
    Nice post and Thanks for sharing this post with us. Yes, blog design is one of the important factor in blogging and it really affects in attracting readers and also give first impression of blog. Page loading time is most important factor as if this time is large it cause to switch our reader to other blog.

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Sudipto,

      No worries. Glad you like the post. A lot of people are saying that page loading is the most important – and I agree with that. Thanks for the comment.

  25. Prakash

    We shouldn’t use too mush banners and links in the sidebar. As it looks really bad and create bad impact on the blog.

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Prakash,

      Definitely. No one likes to see a blog full of banners and links. Not only that but it confuses the visitor as there is too much choice. Thanks for your comment.

  26. yogesh pant

    it is really annoying to have pop-ups and other links which emerge during the reading of the article. Also, what irritates the visitors is the slow speed of the website.

    1. Scott Dudley

      Hi Yogesh,

      I think pop ups are ok, but only the first time a visitor reaches the website. But if they keep appearing and are hard to get rid of, then they are a pain to the visitor. Thanks for the comment.

  27. Edson Hale

    I think as soon as a reader arrives on your blog the first impression he gets must be what your blog is about; secondly its navigation must tell how voluminous your blog is and thirdly front page contents should tell the quality of your blog posts especially their headlines; last but not least the side bar monetization must convey the message that money is not the only objective of your blog.

  29. Nick Rose

    Some good advice here. Page load time can be a particular problem for photographers who have to fill their site with lots of images.

  30. Wilfred Imbukwa

    I did not know that professional bloggers use white backgrounds for their blogs. I have changed my blog to have a white background and wow! I love it. Thanks a lot.

  32. lukman ahsan

    thanks a lot scoot you tell me the some great and nice tips shared here before i create my blog so i increase my knowledge from here and professional blog is very valuable for business.
    I love it to read blogs. Thanks a lot.

  33. Scott Dudley

    Hi Carl,

    I talk about keeping it simple, but still making it look presentable. You don’t need to be a web designer to create this. In fact the more plain it looks the better, in my opinion. It is when you try to add too many plugins and have banners everywhere that it comes unstuck. Thanks for the comment

  34. Manuel

    Hi Scott, nice post. I find quite difficult to get a good balance between content and publicity. Most people want to make money with our blogs, but at the same time, they want to retain their audience.

    Good content and good design are keys to reach both goals, but these two things are very difficult to achieve.

  35. Winsten

    Thank you for the great tips. I must admit that I made the mistake of having too many ads as I was trying to make as much money from advertising dollars. (I assume). You are right in saying that it is only a few dollars that I am making which is really pathetic. I will readjust my strategy based upon your advice. Thank you for sharing this wonderful advise.

  36. Babanature

    Hello Scott,
    This is indeed a nice topic all bloggers should take into consideration. I do agree with your point but i disagree with you on one point, which is making your blog background white.

    Your blog background should be simple and easy to read and does not disturbs the eye. I did not use white background on my blog but i’d say that the writing is bold and anybody can read it. Being different is what makes you unique. Thanks 🙂

  37. Wade Harman

    First impressions are so important in blogging. Especially if you’re wanting to build a reader base and following. You’ve got to make the site user friendly!

    1. Emmanuel

      Hi Wade,
      I obviously do agree with you.First impression says it all.
      Having a great blog design obviously keep readers on a blog for long.

    2. Gautham

      You are right, I feel these blogs with lots of ads and clutter are looking at a one time gain of an ad click or impression (maybe?) but they are not thinking that these first time visitors will not come back again.

  38. Troy

    Great stuff- and thanks for putting #1 in the first spot. That’s the biggest turnoff for me, seeing a million ads right at the homepage. I want to see ideas first, then I can decide if I’ll spend money with you. I don’t like being treated like a potential customer for (insert random product(s) here) right from the get go. Show me some good content first!

  39. Stephen Malan

    Good post. We recently have been struggling with site speed and have contacted HostGator about it. They did some things and now our speed is pretty good.

    Believe site speed is one of the major items that Google looks for or has in its alog at this time.

    Thanks for sharing!

  40. James McAllister

    I have always agreed that simple is best. I try to keep my websites simple enough for anybody to find what they are looking for and navigate the site easily.

    For a while I used a black background, and although I thought it looked wonderful, not all of my readers thought so, so I changed it back to black text on a white background. My visitors are thankful for that.

  41. Leslie Edwards

    Thanks for the tips! Mind if anyone can check out my design and see if there’s anything wrong with it? I actually just redesigned it a few days ago.

  42. Gautham

    I like blogs which look elegant, by elegant, I mean no clutter, less garbage and more of content space.

    I also hate blogs which have 2 or 3 adsense ads within the content area, this creates a bad user experience.

    That is the reason why I like to have a large content area, few widgets in the sidebar and close to no ads on my blog 🙂

  43. Philip

    Hi Scott,

    I agree with you that pop-ups that show up with every page view are one of the worst things on a blog. I can’t imagine why a blogger would do that, because it’s obviously very annoying. I don’t mind pop-ups but once is enough.

    About the sidebars I think they always need to be tested, rotate banners, popular posts widget, change opt-in form colors, ebook image… This way you will know what works and needs to stay on your sidebar and what you should discard since it doesn’t help you with anything by being there.

    Great post, thanks for sharing your expertise.Cheers.

    ~Philip

  45. Tim Bonner

    Hey Scott

    With the latest Google Penguin update just happened, it makes even more sense not to make these blog design mistakes.

    I’ve just recently completely revamped my blog for pretty much every design mistake you mention!

    I tend to agree with Lisa that the floating social media buttons aren’t a wise choice because they don’t work well with mobile phones. I got rid of those a few months ago in favour of having the buttons below the post.

  46. Andrew

    Interesting post and teach many facts about designing. Some old says “People ignore design that ignores people”, i saw many blogs with out proper designing and even it is difficult to read post.These advices are always helps to correct our mistakes.Thanks for share these advices with us.

  47. Jessie B

    These are the mistakes which should be avoided for a successful blog. very informative article. I knew some of the points you mentioned above but now my knowledge has increased through this post.

    🙂

  48. marilyn cada

    hi there scott. thank you for your valuable article. during the last few weeks, i have been thinking of ways to improve the speed of my blog because we all know that the speed is an important factor to make guest stay longer in our blogs. i only knew about wp super cache and i am using it.

    is it okay to use both at the same time? the super cache and the Wp Smush it.?

  49. Jessie

    Hi, people do not realize that a slow loading page can be the death of their blog. I am sure we are all aware that google and the other search engines do checks on your load times. It should be the first thing you should check when doing SEO. Nice post – full of good information. Thanks

  50. rakesh kumar

    Too much meaningless widgets, slow loading time, magzine style blog and hard to navigate blog. I think these are the some points that kill any good blog instantly.

  52. anis

    these are surely the worst mistakes they should be prevented!
    thanks for sharing this great post !

  53. Jason

    Yes, these are really very worst mistakes we don’t concentrate mostly. Thanks for sharing such a nice article.

  54. robin roy

    Thanks for sharing this info! Very insightful and useful for all of us baby bloggers out there. This is a great article and provides excellent advice for online businesses. One high quality blog post is worth hundreds of low quality blog comments or articles so it is really worth going the extra mile to ensure your content is fresh and of the utmost quality. In addition, it is also important these days to build your online brand, you need your brand to be the authority and in order to do this takes a lot of patience, hard work and thinking outside the box. This is an amazing informative post for everyone; personally I found it very useful to me. Wish you all the luck.

  55. Juan Castillo

    Really nice post, Scott. Make it simple, that is the key. When you have many things in your design it is really difficult for your audience to focus on what you want to say.

  56. Ioan Draniciar

    These tips are very helpful Scott.
    I liked the ones that talk about how to improve the loading speed. I’ll check out those plugins. I think you can also check out the Webmaster tools to see what slows down your web pages.

  59. Charan Pammi

    When I am reading this article I opened my blog aside and comparing each and every point ! I am scared to hear too much ads will affect the blog ?

  60. Krishna

    Agree with all your points Scott. I guess too much advertising is the main reason of getting a higher bounce rate.

  61. Chris

    I love this blog post! Its a topic I’ m interested in a lot and I myself do a lot of analyze on this, you’ re absolutely right.

  62. Ferb

    Love tips above and sidebar is important to a blog, with all the banners and things that are not useful to blog really can’t build relationship with readers.

  63. Jon Harthun

    Hey Scott,
    Liked the post a lot! I think that the blog design does play a great role in attracting readers and page loading time has its own significance !
    Regard
    – Jon.

  64. Louis

    I use P3 and yes, it’s a very handy plugin. As for caching plugins, you need to disable them if you intend to modify your blog’s look otherwise you won’t see the modification takes effect.

  65. Farrell John Conejos

    Hey Scott,

    We all know that simplicity is beauty and I guess websites are no exception to it. With a simple yet fast loading page, everything will be as smooth as silk for everyone who views your web page. Having too much decoration turns into a mess sometimes which can also affect the loading speed of web pages. If it’s irrelevant to put into your page, then it’s better not to put a more complex design and instead choose a more simpler one.

  66. jossef

    I totally agree with you, and i have changed everything in my blog according to this post, so thank you, but I could not delete any of my banners in the sidebar i could not, i want to monetize, and it is the only way i know 🙁

  67. Clair

    Hi Scott! Its really a great post. There are lots of blogs which are nearly dead because of this problem. It will be really helpful for them. Thanks for focusing on the important points. If anyone apply your tips, his/her blog will be user friendly which is most important.

  68. Pratish

    Thanks Scott Dudley for the tips. Most of the users didn’t like using very dark colors in website as it makes users difficult to read the whole content of the website. Pop ups, locked contents, too much banner ads, overrated posts, ad posts etc are also hated by many users. Bloggers must avoid using such practices.

  69. Sanjeev

    Hi Scott, A simple and elegant design is a long way to go…most of the bloggers trys to be fashionable and puts too many stuff on a page….which ends up eating the bandwidth and increasing the page loading time…
    You have mentioned few good points…

  70. Phillip

    Hello there Scott, thanks for all these wonderful tips. I just started working on my own SEO and I also do have a blog section on my website. I use to have a lot of pop ups on my blog section and I have to agree with you that too my pop ups does damage your page. Great article and thank you for sharing.

  71. Tom

    Showing up pop up each time when visiting website it’s quite annoying. Sometimes it’s even difficult to just read the content.

    On the image, is that ninja affiliate or wp touch who are longer to load… Can’t really see with those colors ?

  72. Raheel Mushtaq

    The thing i hate the most about website designs is when you can’t find things in navigation and too many ads on the page..!! Sometimes ads come just on your face and finding close button is just too hard.

  73. Wonkie

    Thanks Scott – we’re in the process of moving from our current ComicPress theme to Genesis and you’ve provided some interesting pointers to consider for the new site. Thanks also for the Digg Digg tip – think that’s much more efficient than building the social sharing into each post at fixed points which is what we’ve been doing 🙂

  74. Morshed

    Hi Scott,Thanks for sharing this important topic. The main thing is a blog should be user friendly. For that one should avoid these seven mistakes . Again thanks for the solutions.

  75. Caleb

    That P3 plugin was actually recommended to me and installed by my hosting company Hostgator when a couple of bandwidth issues came up so I can definitely testify to its usefulness.

    And I see on your graph Jetpack taking up so much loading time which something Ms.Ileane conversed about once but nevertheless I am still using it as I just like thew way it presents my basic stats along with the follow me option.

    By the way, your number 3 item is what I tend to have a problem with but I think I’m getting it under control nowadays 😉

  76. Dawn

    I’m redesigning my blog now. I have addressed the clutter, focus and navigation. Now, I’m focused on the page load speed. I do agree that pop-ups are super annoying, I’ve been avoiding adding any to my blog :/

  77. Krishna

    Hey Scott,
    That was really a useful information, and yep these are some common mistake which newbie blogger often do to their blog to make it more attracting. They use different colors, more pop-ups, and bizarre backgrounds and end up with a dull blog.

  78. Raja

    Regarding sidebars i feel visitors are here for our content not to look at our sidebar collection so better we need to concentrate on content. I always do speed tests for my Blogs whenever something causes the site to load slow i will remove/change it instantly.Thanks for your infos

  79. Shamsudeen

    Great post! Number 5 is the biggest obstacle most new bloggers battle’s with. In my opinion, the reason for clustering sidebars with ads and for blogging about just any niche topics they could think of.

    Most young bloggers came to blog for money without thinking of what it takes to make the money, so they plaster every available space on their blogs with both relevant and irrelevant ads banner.

    Ignorance of the fact that making money from blogs is the result of persistence hard work, strategies, tactics, consistence e.t.c.

    Add this to the list : Long wall of text, this scare readers away from reading your articles and makes the eyes tired of reading further.

    At most, 4 lines per paragraph.

    Thank for sharing.

  80. Nathan Brook

    I really agree with you.When a visitor visits your site for the first time, the look of site is the first thing that will determine if he stays or not so, we all should be careful with our sites design

  81. Barry

    Hey Scott, I can’t think of orhave yet seen a website design that as the requirements I need.
    I would like the introduction blog of 500 words or so.
    Then an example of a case study, which I then would like visitors to post their own experiences. Then the process would hopefully continue with my blog post then visitors case study posts. Do you know of a design that I could buy that would also offer a degree of security. Or would they first need to email me and for me to vet the posts before including on the site.
    Many thanks barry

  82. Lily Peaupure

    This makes a great point about having too many sidebars and Ads. I just hate to visit a site, and be bombarded with flashing Ads. It makes me panic and i immediately hit the back button. Blogs should be informational and not scare off visitors!

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