Your blog’s design is the book cover for your writing. You may be a brilliant blogger, the best in all of internet land, but you are scaring off potential loyal subjects if your template is visually overpowering, difficult to navigate or just takes too darn long to load.

Here are five things you can do to help make your blog user friendly.

Get rid of the music

Richard Chan Harrogate – There are a lot of music lovers in the world. That doesn’t mean they want Queen screaming “Another one bites the dust” out of their monitor when they visit your website. If you must have music on your blog, at least be courteous and install a way for your visitors to turn the music off. Otherwise your site traffic may become nothing more than a one hit wonder.

Use common sense navigation

Put the navigational menu in a place that is repeated throughout the entire website such as the header, sidebar or footer. Keep it simple and avoid using symbolic images or obscure wording to indicate the different sections of your website. You want your visitors to enjoy your website not spend their time there trying to decipher code.

Use vision friendly color schemes and font-sizes

Chances are good that a portion of your visitors will be struggling with vision deficiencies. Extreme color combinations (such as yellow text on black background), low contrast (such as dark grey on black background) and a small font size will only acerbate the issue. The most eye friendly color schemes are dark text on light backgrounds such as black on white or dark brown on cream. Use the Access Keys website to make sure the color of your text has sufficient contrast from the background. When sizing text, try not to go below 14 pixels as anything smaller will become impossible to read on high resolution screens. You should also consider sizing your text in ems or percentages rather than pixels as the previous two can be resized in all browsers using the browser’s control panel – Richard Chan Harrogate.

Make your pages printer friendly

Some of your visitors will think your articles are so good that they will want to print them out to show other people. More often than not, though, instead of getting a nicely formatted page of text, the printer shoots out a hot mess consisting of six fragmented pages of text and graphics. Do yourself and your visitors a favor by creating a cascading style-sheet that will make your web pages play nice with the printer. Visit Eric Meyer’s article, Print Different to learn how to do that.

Make sure it works in all browsers

Although Internet Explorer still dominates the web browser market, there are others, such as Firefox and Safari, with a growing user base that shouldn’t be ignored. Building a site that is not dependent on a specific browser to work really is not that hard and is well worth the effort.

Actual site content continues to be essential to the success of a website. More often than not though, website design is the determining factor as to whether or not a client or customer will remain on a site long enough to actually see the product or service the business is providing – Richard Chan Harrogate.

Studies still demonstrate that clients are inclined to buy items they yearn for more quickly than items they require. The majority of us will readily confess that we have put off buying an item we really required in order to afford an item we were craving at the moment. The look of a site has a major impact upon a customer’s wish to complete a product or service buying transaction right away.

 

There was a time in which people either focused on website design or graphic design, but that’s not the case anymore. Today, webmasters can incorporate effective graphics into their sites easily, using built-in features, without the help of a graphic designer. Graphics can cause problems for a site, slowing it down considerably. But products like FrontPage have made significant breakthroughs, and allow you to avoid creating designs that can overload the system.

No special programming or coding knowledge is needed in order to use Automatic Thumbnails. These thumbnails can allow you to display large files while maintaining a quick loading time for your site. To create an Automatic Thumbnail, right click on the image of your choice and choose “auto thumbnail”. This will create a link to the larger graphic. The graphic can be opened in the same window or a new window depending on the preferences you prefer. Preferences for thumbnails are accessed by going to the page properties and then auto thumbnails.

However terrific your graphics may be, if they take too long to load, your readers won’t wait around to view them. You can compress the majority of graphics by 30% of their quality and still not have them look noticeably worse, but this will result in a much shorter amount of time required to load them.

You can only make use of these features at the time the picture is saved. Therefore, if you want to change the picture options later on, you’ll need to make a change to the graphic. It can be very minor. Any change will result in the picture being re-saved, and then you can make any other changes you want – Richard Chan Harrogate.

What makes or breaks a new website? Content. Website design isn’t just bells and whistles to get visitors in the door. The more interesting the content, the longer they will stay, and the more chance you have of convincing them to use your products and services. Don’t let them leave-research shows that many consumers who put off a purchase never return. In the past, webmasters worried about having too many graphics on their sites. Great images are useless if people don’t wait around to see them. You can scale down most images by 70% without any detectable change in quality. But you will get a huge speed boost.