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Top 5 Blog Design Mistakes

There are many blog design tips you can follow as you set up your own blog, but what are the things you should avoid including in your blog's design?  Read about the top blog design mistakes listed below and be sure to avoid them else you risk ruining your blog's chance at success.

1. Clutter

No one will want to spend time on your blog if it's cluttered with too much information, images, text, and so on.  A visitor to your blog will only spend a few seconds viewing your page in order to make the decision to continue reading or click away.  Make sure it's easy to find your valuable content quickly.  Cluttered sidebars, posts overflowing with links, and so on make it difficult to find the meaningful content amidst the extraneous elements.

2. Hard to View Colors

Avoid using a color palette in your blog design that is not easy on the eyes.  For example, it's more difficult to read white text on a black background on a computer screen than it is to read black text on a white background.  Make sure colors are easy to view, linked-text is easy to distinguish by color from non-linked text, and so on.  Try to view your blog on multiple computer monitors to ensure your color palette is easy to read.

3. Too Many Ads

The easiest way to get people to click away from your blog instantly is by filling your blog with ads.  If your blog is covered in ads with difficult to find or limited real content, then your blog will have little chance to become successful and attract large audiences.

4. Too Much Text

Avoid using long blocks of text that are difficult to read on a computer monitor.  Also, avoid creating pages that are very long and require a great deal of scrolling to reach the end.  Try to use white space and reduce the number of posts that appear on a single page of your blog to approximately five to make your blog more visually appealing.

5. No Contact Information

A blog without contact information or an About page that describes who is writing the blog is like a book without an author.  While it is possible for an anonymously written blog to become successful, it's far more common for successful blogs to be written by an authoritative source.  With that in mind, take the time to create a contact page and an About Me page that describes who you are, why you're writing your blog, and how readers can contact you with questions or for more information.

From http://weblogs.about.com
Top 5 Blog Design Mistakes