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When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.—Enrique Jardiel Poncela

Week Three: blog design for beginning and advancing bloggers

Please welcome this week’s guest editor Michael Gray who tweets as @dearharrison and blogs at Dear Harrison. If you have any questions or need any clarification on today’s topic or prompts, please feel free to begin a discussion in comments. The prompts can be found at the very end of the post.

If you’re here just to hang out, click here for the yeah write #66 hangout grid.

Blog design for beginning bloggers

The yeah write summer writer’s series is a great opportunity for us to learn to master the skills necessary for pushing our writing to the next level.  But as bloggers, we have to be concerned with more than just our written content—we also control the packaging and delivery of our words by how we design our blogs.

Fortunately, our modern digital world offers us almost unlimited resources and options for how we craft and structure a blog.  However, the sheer enormity of the different options available to us also gives us the opportunity to misuse our power, sometimes causing our blog’s design to grossly interfere with the most important element on the page—the content.

Content: Choose the Right Theme

When choosing a theme, it’s important to remember that your site’s design should add to the experience, not play center stage.  Any theme—no matter how cool-looking—interfering with your readers’ ability to easily find and consume your content is going to frustrate your readers, and frustrated readers won’t stick around long.

Look for themes that are clean and uncluttered. Clutter equals chaos. When you have guests over to your house, you remove all the things that clutter up the living room—the pile of half-folded laundry, the stack of bills that you still need to go through, the dishes from breakfast that morning, the mountain of books and toys from your child’s bedroom. When you clean the clutter at home, you create a more inviting and peaceful space for both you and your guests.  Shouldn’t we give the same consideration for guests of our blog?

Keep it simple. Clean the clutter. Focus on content.

Readability: Choose the Right Fonts

Fonts are fun!.  When I first started blogging, I used to love to try out many different font styles, different color combinations and different sizes. I was so intoxicated by the totalitarian power I wielded over my blog, I didn’t realize that a yellow scripty font over a blue background made people want to gouge their eyes out. It made me happy, so I did it.

So only my mom read my posts.

Just like there are an almost unlimited number of themes to choose from, font choices are also a sky’s-the-limit situation. And, just like design clutter can create chaos, font clutter can do the same.

On your blog, you have two primary text elements: header and body. The header text will include your post title and any subheadings that may appear in your post.  The body text is the content of your post where you craft your compelling narrative using your authentic voice.

Header and Body Text

Titles and headers are one area where you can be creative with your font styles and colors, but you still need to practice some educated restraint. A good rule of thumb for headers is choose a font that is bold, easy to read and has a color that either matches your body text or a darker key color in your theme. Your header text should be similar in style to your body text, but it doesn’t have to be the exact same font.

For headers, I would avoid script or grunge fonts because they are typically hard to read, especially on a mobile device—for example, nearly fifty percent of Web traffic comes to yeah write from mobile browsers. Also, if your subheaders are set to all caps, look what can happen if you use an overly decorative font:

Now, when it comes to body text, industry should be the order of the day, not creativity. Again, this is your content, and your content is precious. You need to deliver your writing in a way that is easy for your readers to consume. Funky fonts, color combinations and varying sizes are a distraction and are tell-tale signs of an amateur blogger.

One last word on font design: if your blog is text-heavy, avoid using a light-colored text over a dark background. Here’s a well-researched article on the debate. If your focus is on graphics, a dark background highlights your content. If it’s text, words, your story, a light background is better.

All of the fonts referenced in this post can be found at Google Web Fonts. The more fonts loaded on your blog, the slower your pages will load, by the way. If you’ve noticed your blog has been slow lately, check your header.php for unnecessary fonts you’re not using. Not sure what a header.php is or if you have one? Blog design for advancing bloggers, coming up on Wednesday, is for you.

Coming up on Tuesday: Creative and legal use of Web images for your blog

all your story are belong to you

  • Read the summer FAQ page for other details: the grid is being moderated and if you’re missing an element outlined in the summer FAQ, your post will not be published on the grid
  • Let the prompt lead you, but do not include the prompt in any way in your post, not at the beginning as an intro, not at the end as a footnote. If you reference the prompt in your post, your post will not be published on the grid
  • Remember: no more than 500 words. If your post exceeds 500 words, yup, you guessed it—no publish for you
  • If the prompt takes you from thunderstorms to watching TV at your grandma’s house to how much you love Pat Sajak to the oldest person you’ve ever kissed, we want that story the furthest away in your imagination from the original prompt. Let your imagination loose
  • Keep your writing style! Do you tell stories with humor? Prose? Verse? Photos? Illustrations? Keep doing that. We’ll read Shakespearean drama on our own time
  • Cut away at everything unnecessary to your story
  • Not ready to add your entry today? Still perfecting and reading other posts? No problem: you’ve got until Thursday at noon EDT [-4GMT]
  • Don’t forget to badge your post
  • Have fun!

This week’s prompts [courtesy of Tom Slatin]

  • What music album would be used for a movie about your life?
  • Was your first kiss everything you wished or hoped it would be?
  • What is the most amount of money you have had at one time?

Yeah write #66 summer writer’s series grid is open…

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