7 Best Blog Layout Practices For Your Website
Your website’s appearance is everything when it comes to growth. It’s the first thing that your visitors will notice and can even decide whether they’ll stay or leave. In that regard, blog layout is also everything; this is the end result of your mixing and matching with themes, fonts, codes, plugins, and more elements. This is where blog layout practices come into play.
Because when all has been said and done, there are other people or bloggers who have done better and have gone through the trial and error process to determine which blog layout practices are optimal. Be it throughout a combination of procedures and testing methods about user psychology to certain user interface elements that just look good, these practices and elements combine to make your website more presentable.
Hence, we’ve compiled for you some of the most effective blog layout practices you can try out for your website. These can ensure better user experience for your visitors and even you.
Don’t forget the test environment
First and foremost, you have to be careful with making changes to your website. If you’re not really that well-versed in programming or WordPress, you might find it hard to roll back some accidental changes. Moreover, directly making changes to your website might cause some unwanted and inconvenient crashes and errors.
That’s why we recommend doing all your website updates in a test or staging environment first. Staging sites would work best for some minor updates and changes to your site while overhauls or complete site redesigns might be better done in a local testing environment such as on your computer. It might be an extra step but it ensures less stress in the long run.
Update your themes and plugins
This one is pretty standard and is not just limited to ensuring your website’s blog layout. It could be that a theme or plugin you were using went out of date, has a new version, or simply lacked any further support from the creators. That’s why it pays to keep every tool you have updated. It can also help clear up some errors or incompatibilities.
Other benefits include better security, better website speed, and possibly decluttering your plugin and themes repository in case some of them went belly up and are no longer supported. Along with the test environment for any important changes you make to your site, this should also be a mandatory step.
Embrace the grid structure
The grid structure. You’ve probably seen some websites utilize this one to full capacity or even liberally. That’s because it’s one of the best ways to present your content in such a small and minimalistic space. This method dates back from newspapers which often had limited space so they had to make every nook and cranny count.
Applying that design philosophy or practicality to your website can do wonders. You can even apply the grid structure too other aspects of your website such as author pages, or even front pages instead of just in the content archives. These grids can then contain anything from cards that present substantial information summarizing the article to images or even site sections. Do determine what grid structure works best for your site, however, since this should be a balance between practicality and aesthetics.
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The right font size and formatting
Here’s an important one that tends to get overlooked: the font. Often, blogs with written content fail to present the text in a digestible or easily readable form. Regardless of how important or awesome your content is, if people find it hard to read because of the font, then they’ll still leave. That’s why it’s important to tweak to the font size to a recommended 18 pts. for normal text. Apparently, this works perfectly well both the desktop version and the mobile version of your website.
Dark mode and light mode
Here’s a relatively new one: dark mode. Ever since medical professionals and scientists started procuring studies detailing the dangers of digital light on our fragile human eyes, engineers have sought ways to soften the blow from digital screens. Thankfully, programmers came up with their own contribution in the form of dark mode.
It’s essentially reversing the white and black colors on the webpage in order to reduce the bright lights. A lot of popular websites like YouTube and Reddit have already adopted the option and their users are more than happy for it. That very well means your visitors will have the same reaction and benefits from a dark mode and a light mode, especially when your content is primarily in text.
Keep everything simple
It might be tempting to go all out and include every design element you want into your website but this can cause more harm than good. You can clutter up your site and make some rather redundant navigation options that can frustrate your visitors. These can come in the form of unnecessary sidebars, widgets, popups, or whichever gimmick you decide to implement.
On top of that, your website having too many redundant elements can also affect performance. You could be unintentionally slowing down your site speed just for some features you don’t need. The same idea also applies to the mobile version or app version of your blog.
Images retain visitors
Apart from placing images on your content to break the ice and make your content more immersive, there are other ways to utilize them. One of those is having your front webpage as just a big image related to your website. You can make it as interactive as possible. Another would be placing some eye-catching photos or artworks in strategic webpages.
This certainly beats the old and traditional blank webpage with nothing but colors and abstract shapes. The more compelling the image, the better as you can be sure it will catch the attention of your visitors. Make sure to implement these blog layout practices and for more satisfied users and visitors!
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