Archive for the ‘Blog Design’ Category

Blogs That Scare Me Away: Part II.

Sunday, July 15th, 2007

Inspired by Chris Garrett’s question: Does Your Site Frighten Readers Away?, I will evaluate Copyblogger.

I clicked; the main page looked like this:

copyblogger

My first instinct was to find the content. It was right there in the center between the navigation and the ads. So far so good!

Next, I focused on the actual content. At the top, I saw an image of a messy assignment written by a student suffering from ADD. Below that was text relating a story I have heard at least twice a year since I was 7 years old.

This blog did not frighten me; it bored me. I thought: get to the point already!

Out of curiosity, I scrolled past 56 introductory words to discover the main point of this blog article. It’s this:

Omit needless words.
Uhmm… Yeah… Good advice. Why don’t you follow it?

Blogs That Scare Me Away: Part I!

Saturday, July 14th, 2007

Chris Garrett asks Does Your Site Frighten Readers Away? and then suggests readers examine four blogs.

I decided to look at each blog and clicked the link to StevePavlina.com; it scared the heck out of me! Here’s how it looked:

Advertorial Blog
 

Does that scare you?


Clean Your Blog: Oh the Irony!

Saturday, July 14th, 2007

Echoing the advice of Andy Wibbles, Darren Rowse of Problogger advises beginning bloggers to clean up their sidebars. The underlying point both are trying to make is that new visitors need to be able to focus on content when they first arrive at your blog.

Naturally, two other established bloggers wrote posts agreeing with Darren and Andy, leaving trackbacks on Darren’s post. Expecting to see examples of blog layouts that help visitors focus on content, I clicked the trackbacks.

Here’s what I found:

Loofa BlogClean Blog?

I bet your eyes are just riveted to the content in those two blog layouts!

You say you can’t see any content in those screen-shots? Neither can any first time visitor.

If you’d like to watch Andy’s video here it is:


Maybe Andy’s loofa needs to scrub more than the sidebars of some blogs.