Be the New York Times Of Blogging
Do you read tabloids?
What kind of newspapers do you read offline? Are you rather the New York Times or the New York Post type?
To make the comparison more obvious: Are you rather a The Independent or The Sun type? I don’t mean to suggest you’re from the UK!
With the emergence of blogs everybody can publish a New York Times.
It will be less important than the original and have a smaller scope but it will be your own personal newspaper without the paper, a journal or blog indeed.
Are your readers confused?
What is the most striking difference between those two? The content? No, what comes to your attention first is the interface or simply put “the looks”. The New York Times articles have
plenty of room for your eyes to rest and almost no colors, the article page is not cluttered and nothing annoys you.
Some of you probably guess it, it’s about usability. SEO 2.0 is all about user experience. Why? Readers are confused because of a cluttered interface.
They do not find what they seek and hit the “back” button. Users who are annoyed by your site do not come back.
The colors of success
Users that are tired after sitting all day at the office desk do not read your site if it’s colors hurt their eyes.
When all those users do not click or return what do you think happens with your traffic? It drops. Significantly.
- Take care of the SEO of your site, use a black and white theme.
- Do not stuff your pages with thousands of widgets and buttons.
- Leave plenty of white space.
- Make the fonts readable, not too big, not to small, both are hard to read.
- Do not use animation like in banners, use static ones.
Your readers will stay and return frequently. In fact you are going to be the New York Times of your niche with your blog or site.
Great advice. I think a lot of bloggers focus on making sales or getting Ad clicks, and cramming their pages full of buttons and links, only to make their blog look that less professional.
I am a purist, I do not read cluttered blogs at all. If they look crappy, I can’t stand them.
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