5 Actions to Improve Your Blog Design This Weekend

Designing your blog doesn’t have to be a chore. In fact, I would say the best method for honing the perfect design is to take a series of small actions over a long period of time, really paying attention to what works and what doesn’t.

Just one weekend a month of these small steps can put you on a path to blogging greatness without wearing you out or discouraging you. This weekend is as good as any, right? So, let me show you what you can do to make sure your blog is in excellent shape come Monday morning!

1. Install the Perfect Theme

I can tell you all the coolest design tricks in the book, but if you can’t implement them, who cares. You’re a do-it-yourself blog designer, right? You’re probably doing it more out of necessity than passion. Make things easy on yourself and choose a theme that facilitates your goals. You want to design without programming, so choose a theme that lets you do that.

I personally use and recommend Headway. It lets you drag, drop, pick and choose to your heart’s content without ever touching any HTML, PHP, Javascript or CSS. You’ll be able to create the design you actually want instead of one you just have to accept. Before you take any other action, get Headway. You’ll thank me for it later.

2. Don’t Be Schizophrenic

Figure out what your identity is and stick with it. Implement it across all pages of your blog. Figure out how you want your readers to feel about your site and then decide what colors, layout, terminology and logo best evoke those feelings. If you need help, check out my guide on the Art of Blog Branding.

3. Know What You Want Your Readers to Do

This is one of the biggest lessons in my free course, Planning the Perfect Blog in 7 Days. If you don’t know what you want your readers to do, then how can your blog design be efficient? It can’t be. The purpose of the blog design is to facilitate your goals. If you don’t know what those goals are, you’re just decorating a web page for no particular reason. What should your readers see? Where should they go? What should they do when they get there? If you need to figure out what you want you readers to do, sign up for Planning the Perfect Blog in 7 Days. It’s free and you’ll learn everything you need to know to craft that perfect design.

4. Create a Custom Homepage

You might have noticed that a lot of blogs are starting to look less and less like blogs, they are looking like full-blown websites. This is due in part to the creation of custom homepages. If there’s a specific action you want your visitors to take, make a special effort to emphasize that on your homepage. It will encourage your readers to take a particular action and it also has the added benefit of making your site look larger, which is very helpful if you’re just getting started.

For example, here at Blog Design Guy, my top goal is to get readers to join my free online course, Planning the Perfect Blog in 7 Days. If you head over to the homepage, you’ll see that it doesn’t look like the rest of the blog. It’s laid out specifically to facilitate that goal. A custom homepage might be exactly what you need to bring your design to life and engage your readers!

5. Make Things Interesting with Video

Since its inception, the Internet has been built on the written word. In this age of YouTube and shorter attention spans, video really stands out and engages readers. Who knows, it might even be your thing! I love writing, but there’s nothing like opening up a recording program and just letting everything come out naturally and unfiltered. You’ll likely be able to connect with your readers more easily this way. It’s much easier to trust a smiling face or a friendly voice than a series of cold characters on a blank page.

If you’d like to try video, I can highly recommend a couple tools. I use these personally for all the videos you find here. For the videos you see of my desktop, I use ScreenFlow. It records your entire screen so that you can show people how to do things on their computers or on the web. It can also record from your webcam while it records the screen so people can see you talking.

For the general editing of videos (intros, outros, etc.) I use iMovie which is part of iLife. It provides lots of cool transitions, jingles, sound effects and more. It’s complex enough to make videos look unique and professional, but simple enough that a non-video geek can still get the hang of it.

Also, if you check out the video on the homepage, you’ll see that I also do presentation style videos. These are made with ScreenFlow and Keynote. Also highly recommended! If you’d like to do a blackboard-style video, you could also use ScreenFlow with Photoshop or another image editor.

So, Will You Do It?

If you don’t do it this weekend, when will you do it? Often, the most important step is the first one. I’ve told you what you can do, so go get started! Your blog will have new life on Monday!

Be sure to show off what you’ve done in the comments below. I’d love to see your weekend work!

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