3 Essential Design Principles For a Blog

A good blog design isn't just about implementing best web design practices, but involves much more than that. Unlike static websites, a blog incorporates much tighter integration of social features to facilitate direct interaction with the community. This makes designing task a bit tricky to get the maximum benefits from the available real estate on your blog. Lets dig in and try to find out some of the most necessary guidelines for designing a blog that keeps your visitors hooked.

Apply C.R.A.P Principle

If you're a web or graphic designer, you may already be implementing this concept on every website/blog coming out from your studio. For those, who are not aware of C.R.A.P principle, I must stress that it's not 'crap' but C.R.A.P (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity). It's one of the basic web design principle applicable to every single web page to make it more appealing and effective.

• Contrast - Every blog have different sections comprising of content, header, footer, ads, comments and sidebar. These sections form a single unit (web page), yet they are logically separated from one another. If your blog visitor can identify these different sections easily without getting confused, it means you've applied the first rule well and good. Do not make different sections identical enough that visitors find it difficult to view each section as a separate unit.
• Repetition - The design and style implemented for each section should be applied across every single web page. Change in style may lead to confusion resulting in bad browsing experience for your visitors. Whether it's home page, single post page, static page or archives page, keep the style of each section uniform.
• Alignment - Now this is very simple. Arbitrary alignment of objects makes the web page look like dump yard. Streamline related objects aligning them uniformly to make your page well organized, more attractive and legible.
• Proximity - The last but not the least is the proximity rule. Group all logically related objects together and keep them close to each other to form a well-organized cohesive unit. This ensures the section comprising of logically related objects serves its purpose and gives you maximum benefits.

Do Not Include Everything

It's a honeypot that looks good while implementing, but makes your blog bleed in the long run. It's very tempting to include fancy flash objects, rotating image galleries and similar elements to give a richer experience to the visitor. But behind it, you require well-optimized code, carefully chosen multimedia plugins and a good hosting server. A good blog design is considered to run fast with minimal hiccups even when several multimedia objects or scripts are running behind the scenes. Here are some guidelines to keep only the essentials and to cut down the weed.

• Avoid flash objects wherever you can.
• While choosing a multimedia plugin, make sure it passes the performance benchmark and doesn't consume too many server resources.
• Use CSS + web optimized images, instead of scripts to beautify your theme sections.
• Keep your content on the left. Research suggests that while viewing a web page, human eye tends to scan left to right.

Make it Social

Unless you don't provide ample options to share and aggregate your blog content, you're defeating the whole purpose of creating a blog. It's the community nurtured around a blog that makes it successful. Every good blog design includes rich integration of social media elements to allow easy commenting, bookmarking, subscription and cross-posting to popular new media platforms. Here's a checklist to make sure your blog design is well-equipped to handle social media savvy traffic.

• Consider using a third party commenting system consisting of richer integration of popular social media services. Some of the commonly used commenting systems are Disqus and Intense Debate.
• If you stick to native commenting system, use popular social media plugins like CommentLuv, Twittar to return social love to your commentators.
• Include bookmarking section right below the post body to get the maximum sharing clicks.
• I'm not a fan of top and bottom social media bars quite common nowadays. They hinder your normal browsing activity and are irritating. However, you can experiment with them and can consider in your blog design plan.
• Consider displaying your latest tweet in your blog's header or footer to encourage more twitter following. Nowadays, large number of blog designs includes twitter updates matching the theme in various sections of the blog.

And last but not the least, I'd strongly suggest you to consider buying a premium Wordpress theme. The reason is quite simple. You get a well optimized and clean code that runs fast and is flexible enough is meet your design needs. Which premium theme you should consider? Well, that I leave up to you

Image Credit : MikeBlogs

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Written by Rajeev Edmonds | | View Comments

Quora : A Socially-Driven Information Resource

Year 2010 saw several new social media start-ups and one of them is Quora, co-founded by Adam D'Angelo (Facebook's former CTO) and Charlie Cheever. It's a socially-driven collection of questions and answers with emphasis on maximum user-participation featuring tight integration of social features. In recent months, it has acquired impressive user base and is growing strongly. I recently signed up for Quora and found it very interesting and useful resource. Let's see how can you make most out of this promising social media service.

Quora is all about user-generated content that's improved and refined over time. It's the users who ask questions, which in-turn triggers answers from other users. You can follow topics, questions and of course users of your choice. There's a voting system that ensures best answers are elevated to the top to keep the quality high. It has a followers & following system similar to a micro-blogging platform. Tagging similar to facebook ensures you can quote/refer/credit the desired source.

Questions are the building blocks

Yes, that's the backbone of quora. You create, answer, comment, vote, edit, aggregate, segregate and share questions with the Quora community and beyond (twitter and facebook). If used properly, Quora can build your brand and authority as you are surrounded by tons of questions that falls in your niche. You can provide your expert views and can update them as many times as you want. Since some of the answers may create a controversy or the user may not want to reveal his identity, Quora provides a facility to comment anonymously.

After sign-up, you may struggle to submit your very first question if it doesn't pass Quora guidelines. Thankfully, there are countless administrators, moderators and volunteers that are ready to help you post your first question smoothly. The most important thing is not to address an individual/person while asking a question. Keep it generic and free of grammatical mistakes. You can also attach a brief description with your primary question to make it more understandable for the community. The amount of flexibility Quora provides while posting a question is amazing. You can make it anonymous, redirect it to a related question, forward it to selective users, add topics to it and of course can stop monitoring it. You can also mark a question as a best source. This indicates the question has been favored as the most credible and complete information about the topic. You can also prevent users from adding more categories to the questions to avoid appearing them in irrelevant streams.

I've found the 'Monitor Question' option extremely useful, especially when lots of constructive discussion is going on by industry experts. Don't confuse it with 'Follow Question' option. The difference between both is quite simple. 'Monitor Question' sends instant email notifications as soon as new answers/edits are posted, whereas selecting 'Follow Question' option ensures the question appears in your home news feed.

Getting most out of Quora

Since I started using Quora, some interesting observations grabbed my attention that leads to better utilization of this useful platform. Some of these trends/observations are very elementary applicable to almost every social media service, while others are unique to Quora. So let's get started and see how we can get the maximum benefit/returns from Quora by using these simple tips and tricks.

• Upload your avatar - If you've used Digg, you can remember some of its power users (e.g. babyman) just by their avatars. It helps build your brand among thousands of enthusiasts in your niche. After creating your profile, make sure you've uploaded your avatar.
• Complete your profile - Don't left your profile information incomplete. Fill-in all the fields, as Quora's search functionality is extremely powerful. If you want to widen your reach, make sure you keep your profile updated.
• Don't ask just for the sake of asking - That's what a good percentage of users do without thinking about the consequences that may lead to being marked as a spammer. Resist the temptation to bombard your followers with countless questions.
• Make your question unique and interesting - That's one of the primary factors that ensures you get the maximum responses from the Quora community. It also helps in building your reputation. Some of the best Quora power users are known for their rich set of interesting questions.
• Liberally up-vote the best answers - Promoting good content ensures others also get good stuff and at the same time you get new followers widening your reach.
• Share on social stream - Quora lets you directly post your activity on twitter and facebook. This helps in getting more eyeballs for your questions and answers.
• Select all topics related to a question - Whenever you post a question, take some time and select all the related categories. This ensures a large network views your question.
• Tag people, questions and topics - That's how you grab attention and make the resource more useful and credible. Here I must warn about overdoing it, as it may put your question/response in the review queue.
• Redirect your question to a parent question (if any) - Often you will find that your question completes or adds value to a similar question asked earlier. It's the perfect situation to redirect your question to the related question. This way you add value to the original question and will get more responses from the people already monitoring the original question.
• Keep home feed clean and uncluttered - to ensure you don't waste your time reading junk. Select relevant topics and unfollow those disseminating irrelevant stuff on regular basis.
• Ask questions directly to active/power users - If you think, your question has the potential to go viral, don't hesitate to directly pass it on to a power user. If he responded (positive or negative), your question is bound to be received well by the Quora community.
• Avoid commenting anonymously - Nobody loves anonymity within a social group. If you disagree with an answer, down voting is one of the options. Sometimes its very useful when you follow a question anonymously just to watch the heated debate going on among your competitors.
• Keep you account index-able -Quora has an option of search engine privacy. By default, it is disabled. When enabled, your Quora profile and all the related activities are shown as anonymous user in search result pages. If you're looking to build your authority/reputation, you'd like to keep it off.
• Help new users - Quora provides the flexibility to edit the questions posted by the community. This helps in building connections thus improving the overall browsing experience. It's very helpful for new users who are looking for someone experienced to help them out in getting used to Quora.

So what are you waiting for? Head over to Quora to exchange the best with like-minded peers. Grow your authority, be recognized as an expert and give your best to the community. Before I close, I must mention about the fast and clean interface Quora engineers have developed for the community. There's no heavy flash/scripts that makes a site sluggish. The interface is minimal and extremely fast. So let's get connected on this excellent social media platform.

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Written by Rajeev Edmonds | | View Comments