I recently asked Pushing Social readers to tell me “Why” they blog.
I learned that “PSers” blog to teach, entertain, persuade, and sell. I suspect that many bloggers fall into these same categories.
So tell me something…
Why do most blogs look the same?
Sure colors and logos change but most blog themes have the same wide body column for blog text and the narrow right hand column for sidebar stuff.
A photography blog looks like a foodie blog. A t-shirt ecommerce blog is the mirror image of an essay-type blog.
This doesn’t make sense. It’s like a beauty salon leasing a big-box store, the purpose just doesn’t fit the experience.
Ron Johnson, the former Apple Store architect and new CEO for JC Penny, wrote on the HBR blog…
“People come to the Apple Store for the experience — and they’re willing to pay a premium for that.”
The power of “experience” applies to blogging too…
Think about Social Media Examiner, Mike Steltzner has created a social media magazine with a distinct branding and editorial strategy. The site’s meteoric rise is evidence of careful purpose and creative alignment.
How about the 4-Hour Work Week Blog? In one glance you know that you are going to get high-quality, well-researched, body-hacking information that you won’t find anywhere else.
Recently, Copyblogger changed its blog to promote it’s core business purpose – Internet Marketing for Smart People. The Copyblogger experience makes it clear that solid content and smart business goes hand-in-hand.
If your blog is struggling to achieve traction then take a close look at your blog’s design.
The good news is that evolving your blog’s design is getting easier every day.
How to Make Sure Your Blog Sounds and LOOKS Great
I’m a big fan of StudioPress. They have built a well-architected WordPress framework along with beautiful theme designs. Woo Themes also has some great themes that are distinctive and easy to customize.
With that said, I want to show you how to match your blog’s purpose with a theme that will make it resonate with your readers.
Blogs that Teach
These blogs are focused on sharing tutorials, step-by-step instruction, and examples.
Sample Blog Theme: Focus (StudioPress)
Elements to Look For:
- Nested Navigation: Teaching blogs often have different levels of instruction across multiple categories. These blogs require easily understand navigation that can store a lot of information in an easy to understand format.
- Multi-media Friendly: Wide body columns make it easy to embed HD quality video tutorials and presentations.
- Community Widgets: The theme should have easy tools for encouraging readers to interact with one another.
Blogs that Entertain
Your content is meant to excite the senses and keep the reader coming back for more.
Sample Blog Theme: Crystal (StudioPress)
Elements to Look For:
- Visually focused: Your cartoons, videos, photography and art should be the center of attention and everything else should be secondary.
- Caption friendly: You most likely will want your art to speak for itself. Your theme should have layouts that make captions and excerpts easy to write and interesting to read.
- Multimedia friendly: Your theme should make it very easy to embed photography and video with a click of a button. You don’t want a layout that forces you to compromise your content to fit its quirks.
Blogs that Persuade
Every post is intended to challenge, inspire, and change your readers perception of the world. The written word is king.
Sample Blog Theme: Minimum (StudioPress)
Elements to Look For:
- Text friendly: Your readers will be spending a lot of time absorbing your posts, make sure your theme has great typographic options.
- Inviting and Engaging Comments: Although Discus, IntenseDebate, and LiveFyre provide much of the blogging world’s comment options, your theme should provide excellent options for customizing your comments section.
Blogs that Sell
These blogs have uncluttered designs optimized for showing-off products and generating sales. Over the last couple of years, theme creators have done a great job creating ecommerce-driven blog designs.
Sample Blog Theme: Inspire Commerce (Woo Themes)
Key Ingredients:
- Embedded ecommerce (Paypal, Google Checkout): Blogs themes are usually not built with ecommerce in mind. Make sure that you use a theme that seamlessly integrates payment buttons, ideally with a simple code-snippet.
- Advertising Widgets: You may want to monetize your blog with advertising as well as product sales. Look for sidebar layouts that can accommodate a variety of banner advertising sizes.
- Customized Menus – Look for a theme that makes it easy to customize your menus to fit your product mix. Ideally, you should be able to create multiple navigation bars and place them in a variety of locations.
About Stanford
If I may interject with a different POV: Your theme & colors should reflect your emotions and convey your mood. Are you living on the EDGE? then you should have a design that shows what Edge your on. Are you a Lawyer, and you want a Professional look, find a clean sharp design.
But most blog sites don’t do this, where is that individualization?
Has anybody thought about the body of content: if the reader has only a few minutes to read your blog, why do you make them scroll below the fold to find anything relevant or that resonates? Place quick finds above that fold.
Best of Luck to all that inter the blog field
I think most bloggers do a rush job on their blog designs so they can get started and build a following (and/or funds to than put those resources to pay for a good design). Not being tech savvy does not help the cause. I find myself in that place now. I know I need a better design but I need to keep writing AND get business. So I have to choose the priority until I can get to the point where I evolve (and of course ask my followers to tell me how I should evolve making them feel a part of that process).
I like this post, reminds me I gotta get a move on!
@moraloutreach1 I think you are right. In this case – rushing is totally unwarranted. I advocate taking a methodical approach to finding what will work for your blog. You are focusing your time right now – which is cool – but when you pull the trigger make sure you come back here for some tips!
@Stanford Already feeding to the blog!
hey Stan,
So…Im not sure what the point is here and yet I enjoyed every second of it
More to the point, most blogs look the same because most books look the same. We are not only conditioned but we also expect certain “elements” in our books/blogs.
Can you buck the trend and use white letters on black background? Sure, but you will make it very hard for the reader to actually read your stuff.
Social Media Examiner (which I agree, has an awesome design) is identical to both your blog and mine. Sure, few design elements give it zaz, but it’s essentially the same blog as ours.
What am I missing here?
Hey Dino, here’s the deal – I’ve been thinking about what it takes to take blogs to the next level. Design is the obvious area and we seem to be all singing the same tune.
It bugs the hell out of me that Pushing Social is identical to everyone elses. This post is me thinking out loud why this is a problem. I don’t want to buck the trend and do something hideous but it’s time to move the goal posts here.
@dino_dogan My god Dino! I’m not talking about white on black type dude.
By the way, this blog’s look will be updated soon to reflect the true purpose of what I’m doing here – teaching and entertaining. Stay tuned.
I love this, it’s a weird reversal of a post I just wrote on the website designs of strong sites – also featuring Tim Ferriss! I think a lot of blogs do have very dull designs – great as WordPress is, it can also deaden any design.
@alisonmacleod Hey share your link with the PSers here. Love to read what you’ve got!
Perhaps most bloggers pick a theme that simply looks great aesthetically and even better if it is a free theme!
@janwong Now that is a downright stupid way to pick a theme. I certainly hope that this isn’t the case!
I think most bloggers, just grab a theme they see somewhere and just use it as it is. Either they are not technically savvy and don’t know how to tweak the design OR they just don’t bother.
Either way, I think every blogger SHOULD CARE about the blog design, and really.. make an effort to make it a memorable experience for the visitor.
@BetterBloggingWays I agree. Thanks for weighing in on this