Photography: Being different by dao hodac

Your website or blog’s design is important. It’s the medium your readers use to interact with and consume what you create. Most of all, it represents an opportunity: to draw readers into your content by presenting it as clearly and functionally as possible.

That’s all well and good, but a more difficult question to answer is: does my design work? Is it a tool my readers use, or an obstacle they have to work around?

In this post, I want to help you look at your design with fresh eyes by offering a list of 11 questions — questions you can answer that, when combined, should give you a general idea of the effectiveness of your design, as well as identifying areas that could be improved.

Compatability

1. Have you tested it in another browser?
If you’ve only ever viewed it in Firefox, check that it works in Internet Explorer, and vice versa. These browsers each interpret code differently and the process can make a website that looks fine in one browser completely unusable in another — blocking out around half your potential readers.

Uniqueness

2. Have you seen another blog or website that looks very similar?
You’re probably both using the same theme. This happens a lot, but when it does, you want to implement some tweaks to make your theme unique. This can be achieved by adding a unique header image, changing the color scheme of text and links, re-arranging the page elements, and so on.

Visitors will remember a unique design and recognize your blog when they see it again. Your design certainly doesn’t have to be gorgeous but it should be different. Scobleizer’s design is very ordinary but you probably won’t come across another blog with a photo of Robert Scoble as its header image. Unless it was a Robert Scoble fan blog, of course…

Readability

3. Do your headlines stand out?
Most designs do this by default but yours might be one of the few that don’t.

There’s a reason newspapers use big, prominent headlines. You should them to be doorways to your content — the more prominent and interesting they are, the easier it is for your reader to get a foot in the door.

4. Is there enough space between rows of text?
There’s nothing more painful than trying to read lines of text stacked on-top of each other with little or no spacing. Adding some space between the lines will help your readers to consume content faster and more easily.

5. Does you color scheme make it easy to read?
Black on white is easy to read. Grey on black isn’t. In fact, anything on black and readability suffers. Faint colors on light backgrounds are also a headache (though designers seem ever-increasingly fond of this combo).

6. Is there white-space around your content?
This means, is there a bit of empty space between your content and other elements? If your content runs right up to the edge of the screen, or runs too close to your side-bar, this can affect readability because it becomes more difficult for they eye to separate your content from everything else. Here’s a site that uses plenty of white-space to good effect. Also, your white-space doesn’t have to be white — any background color will do.

An easy way to increase white-space is to make your content-column narrower, or add more padding around it.

Usability

7. Do all your links work?
Sometimes it can be easy to assume that because something should work, it does work. I learned this the hard way when a reader sent an e-mail informing me that several links in the category menu were broken. Worst of all, I added them a few weeks before I got the message. If I had given each link a quick click to make sure it worked the problem would have been avoided.

Broken links send the message that your site is neglected — even though this usually isn’t the case at all. Take the time to check the links in your design.

8. Are your most important pages easy to access?
Your About page, your Contact page, your Archives (if you have them), Categories (if you have them), and feed link (if you have one) are an important part of how readers work through your content. If these pages are buried under ads or obscured behind other, less-essential links, your readers will find it difficult to work with your site.

9. Is your category list short and useful?
Others will disagree with me, but I’m a firm believer that any category list containing more than 20 categories is no longer fulfilling its purpose. If your category list is too big readers will ignore it. The smaller it is, the more likely they are to give it a quick once-over and see if any of the topics take their interest.

10. Is everything clearly marked?
Sometimes you encounter a link or page element which seemed self-evident to the author but makes no sense to you. Label the elements of your sidebar and the different links you might have inserted at the bottom of your content.

Stating the obvious can be a faux pas in conversation, but your readers might appreciate it. What seems obvious to one person can be very confusing to another.

Advertising and Monetizing

11. Does your site contain in-text ads (like ContentLink)?
If yes, my advice would be to cancel the service. These ads rely on readers confusing them with ordinary links. The loss of a reader is a significant price to pay for 2c.

12. Are your ads a barrier to your content?
I’ve seen a lot of sites lately with a block of AdSense inserted under content headlines, forcing readers to scroll over it if they want to read what they came for. The advertisement tells them: “If you want the content, you have to go through me first” — in other words, I’m going to take from you before I give.

This is, of course, not what the author is thinking. It seems logical to put ads where the reader’s eyes are — in the content. In the short-term it might increase clicks but I think such practice damages the respect your readers have for you. In the long-term this can be crippling.

When you’re done

Now that you’ve worked out areas your site’s design could be improved the next step is implementing the changes you need. Some of them will require a little CSS know-how — but don’t run for the hills yet.

I learned what I know of CSS by Googling the questions I wanted answered. If you want to change the color of links on your page, Google “How do I change the color of links CSS”, for example. There are CSS tutorials on every topic and many of them are targeted at beginners. So far, I haven’t had a CSS question that couldn’t be answered by searching.

With a little work you can tweak your design into something your readers will truly enjoy interacting with.