What is the first thing you’ll do when someone is going to pay you a visit? Perhaps you’re going to fix yourself, clean your place, make sure everything is in order. I’m sure you don’t want your visitors to see your place is at mess. I believe cleaning your place is the most basic act of courtesy one can show to their guests. This gives them the impression that they are welcome to your place.
The same concept applies on our blog. We should keep our blog clean to make it very inviting to our visitors. You don’t want to spoil a good chance to give a pleasant impression to your readers. Even if your contents are good but your site is cluttered and difficult to read, I don’t think your readers will enjoy your posts that much. Perhaps they’ll just browse through and leave – I am guilty of this. When I visit a blog and felt like it’s a mess, I’ll just look at the latest post’s title. If nothing caught my attention, I’ll hop to another blog. On the other hand, if I find the blog is clean I usually stay there for about 5 minutes and see what it has to offer.
Messy blogs can also degrade the value of your blog’s design. It’s senseless to have a very sleek or very cool blog layout when you don’t know how to clean up your blog! Isn’t it much better to visit a place that is not-so well designed but very well-kept? than a well designed but run-down? To maintain cleanliness in your blog, perhaps you need to set some standards. Here’s mine:
- No To Tag Cloud – I don’t put tag clouds. The uneven sizes of the fonts in the cloud looks really messy. Though tag clouds are very useful for navigation. I’m still deciding if I can consider 3D tag clouds.
- Minimal Animated/Moving Ads – Animated/moving ads is my least priority. I usually grab the steady ones. If I had no choice, I’ll put animated ads at the bottom of my blog.
- Limit Categories – I limit my categories to 10-12. I believe 10-12 can already cover up a lot of topics.
- Complement - Whenever I put a widget or an ad, I make sure that the color compliments with my blog design. I also make sure the sizes of those widgets and ads compliments with the location where I’m putting them.
- Standard Font – I use Verdana as my standard font. Using only one font can make everything look uniformed and well organized.
Well I hope let’s start cleaning our blogs. Set some standards especially on your ads. Be responsible enough to clean your blog and be more readable in public.
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In a line: Clean blogs invites visitors.
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