Common Blog Design Mistakes

Common Blog Design Mistakes
The things you should not put in your new blog

The design of your blog plays a great part in the terms of bounce rate for your blog. Bounce rate is the extent of how long visitors stay. Almost new blogs should have a simple and easy to navigate blog design. And because it has still few gadgets and contents it aside from easier navigation, it will also load faster. You can also download and install templates you want but make sure you can manipulate the codes and do not leave broken links, or links that points to the template source but not the attribution link of the creator. They can report copyright infringement to your blog if out remove their copyright urls.

And here are other things you should not put in your blog:

Too many flash animations

Don’t fill your blog with too many moving objects, flashing or moving letters etc. Only use them for header for example and just minimize using animations. We know animations distract readers eyes and may not concentrate to your content anymore. Other ways to put animations is in post title, buttons, but still it should be the ones you want to emphasize to your readers. Unless for ads you may not remove or disable animated ads because they are the ones generating income for your blog so I suggest you to minimize ads instead.

Too many external links

Refrain from placing many links to other sites in your blog. Aside from negative effect to the SEO of your blog, this also can make your bounce rate higher, visitors will be easily driven to other sites of you put many links anywhere in your page. Just like animated images, only add links if it is entirely necessary for an article or for any affiliate sites you might associated with. But for links to your own site or also called internal links, you can put many of them in your posts, internal links make search engine crawlers to travel to all pages of your site.

Too many ads

This is actually related to the first one, flash animations. Too many ads can irritate visitors, they will just think that your blog is only for making money and they can’t really get some valuable information there. There should be at least 1-3 ads in a single page, minimizing your ads also can greatly increase your ad CTR meaning more income for your blog. If a visitor see many of these images that obviously look like advertisement they will more likely not to click them so if you are thinking that adding many ads will generate more income for you, think again this time.

Remember your blog is still new so you must not add anything to drive away readers, make it as simple and attractive as possible. If the time comes that you already get a lot of regular visitors from search engines, you can now improve your design and add more gadgets, feature, and other stuffs your visitors can enjoy.