When we see a blogs design we can easily distinguish the beginner and the professional. But even for a beginner, you can make a professional looking blog.
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1. Make your site look and feel very important.
The look of your site makes the first impression on the readers and visitors. Make it nice, simple and clean. Use templates that has the right color combination or blends with its widgets and not something that hurts the eye.
Most of us blog for money, right? I suggest wait for the right time putting advertisements, do not put any ads on your blog site. Let the readers read your articles without ads, sometimes, when a reader sees too much ads they instantly leave your blog site.
2. Put social Media Buttons.
Social media buttons are those icons of famous social networking sites. They are very useful in promoting your blog site. Users can easily Like or share your blogs content using those widgets. But, do not put all of those media buttons, I suggest you put only those famous social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkIn, Google+ so it won't take so much space.
3. About and Contact page
Have a proper About page – write about the site, yourself, the team, etc. Having a good About page lets you connect with your users and blogging is all about creating relationships. It also shows how serious you are about the site/blog you are running.
Instead of mentioning mailto links, have a contact page where users can fill a form and submit to send an e-mail. Doesn’t it sound nice and easy.
4. Edit your template
For beginners, customizing your template is a headache. But, based in my experience when I was a newbie, Blogger was the best for first timers because you can learn all by yourself. In blogger you can add and move widgets easily, and chose templates that will fit your style.
You can also customize a bloggers template by editing its html codes. But only for those who knows html. Make sure you backup or save your template regularly. If you really suck at designing you could always seek professional help. These are the pros, and they can give you a really good blog design just the way you want them.
5. Update Regularly
If you want your blog to grow and make money from it, you need to develop a consistent publishing schedule. Readers will visit your blog on a daily basis, looking for fresh and interesting content. If you don't publish regularly, visitors will take your blog lightly, and you must make them feel that this blog is really important. Consistent publishing is one way for readers to know that you are serious about your blog
6. Easy to navigate
Design your blog to have proper widgets, and make sure they are working properly. Put your popular posts and any other widgets that might help for easy navigation. Most readers are lazy, they wan't shortcuts. so give them shortcuts, put a sitemap or table of contents on your blog site, so that they can see all of your articles.
Make sure you use a font style that is easy to read and a font color easy to the eyes. We use our eyes for reading, so we must make our blog appealing to our eyes.
7. Annoying Pop-ups
This is one I hate the most, Pop-ups! they just appear out of nowhere, whenever you refresh your page, they appear again. Pop-ups ruin the professional image of your blog. Readers are there for your content and not for those pop-ups. Let the readers enjoy reading without distractions
