10 Biggest Mistakes in Blog Web Page Design

As an active blogger, I come across blogs and websites that are fantastic as far as web design.  But, I also come across many other blogs that have a horrible web page design, which makes me want to exit as quickly as possible.  And, I am sure you can figure it out, but you don’t want people to exit out of your website! You may have great content on your blog, but if you don’t have the best web design, visitors will never stay long enough to read your great content.  

There are plenty of mistakes in the world of web design. Let's look at what I believe to be the 10 biggest.

Many people these days are trying anything to make money online and monetizing a blog is another great opportunity.  I understand that ads are one way to do this, but there is a such thing as being subtle.  The ads re supposed to blend in, not dominate the pages.

Put yourself in your visitor’s place and take a good hard look at your blog, and ask yourself if the ads feel a bit intrusive. Does the site look like a valuable source of information or does it feel more like a place-holder for advertising?

This makes me crazy to be honest.  It is equivalent to walking into a store and being bombarded with sales people before you even have made it inside to store.  Give visitors breathing room and a chance to look around first!  I am just going to ask you - please, don't use a Flash intro on your website. I don’t believe they are affective and more likely will scare people off.  In addition, they have been so overused that they're becoming universally mocked.

This goes the same for any flashy music, banners, video, or any fancy "noise" that just takes away from the value of the actual content. Focus on the content - not the presentation.

This seems obvious to anyone that has spent any significant amount of time on the Internet, but in case it is not obvious - don't use light colored text on a light background or dark text on a dark background. You don’t want your readers to have to struggle to see your posts. 

Text is most easily read with extreme contrasts between the background and text. Black on white is about as good as it gets for readability. Red on black is pretty painful on the eyes. Yellow on white isn't recommended either.

When I come to a website, one of the first things I look for is how to get around and what is offered on the site. If people do not enter on your home page, you do not want your visitors at a dead-end with no way to access the rest of your site. If it takes 10 steps to try and get to a simple page, you are going to lose your audience. 

The layout should be clean, simple, and easy to navigate.  There should not be any confusion on what your site offers and how to find these offers and information. If it takes more than 10 seconds (remember people are not patient) to find any sort of navigation interface, people will leave.  Simple.

This does not apply to all blogs - mainly WordPress self-hosted blogs. This mistake is more of a subtle design flaw that may not be apparent to a visitor.  However, if you have 100 plugins, it will drag down load time and well, people are not very patient.  Not only that, but Google likes quickly loading pages, so it could potentially hurt your page rankings.  Take some time to learn some basic HTML, CSS, and php – many of the functions can be easily fixed with some basic coding.

For the benefit of your visitors, it's best if you mark external links, either by making them a different color or using some kind of clear distinction. Some web pages are designed to show links only when people hover their mouse over the link.  While this might make the design look nicer, it is not very user friendly or obvious.

Instead, use a clear contrasting color for links. This makes them more visible to the user, thus more user-friendly. It's also good to make the external links open in new windows, so people aren't leaving your site altogether when they click them.

Speaking of links, another web page design mistake is broken links. Make it a habit to check your links regularly to make sure that they still work. There's nothing worse than finding a site that looks helpful, only to find that it hasn't been updated in months or years, so most of the links don't work. While a website does mostly run itself after a while, that doesn't mean that you should neglect essential regular maintenance.

I know people want their blog to stand out by using fancy fonts, but it only makes browsers have a hard time displaying the text.  Stick to the most common web fonts: Arial, Tahoma, Georgia, and Verdana.

 If you use more obscure fonts, then many users won't have them -- and those that do will find your text hard to read. The only place for non-standard fonts is in your header or logo if it is displayed as an image.

Not everyone has eagle eyes, nor do they need text in super-size font to fill up the screen. It's important to keep your text around the standard size. Making text too big or too small makes it hard to read and annoying for many users. The best thing you can do is use relative text sizing (not pixels) that allows the browser to respect the user's preferred text size.

Text that is really tiny may allow you to fit it all in, but is hard to read.  In addition, if your text is too large, it could take too much scrolling to get through one post.

Your site may not function properly or load correctly if you do not use proper HTML or CSS code in your blog design. Proper coding standards should be followed for cross browser compatibility. There are many aspects to this.  For example, proper height and width attributes ensure the page is viewed correctly as the page loads. W3 provides a widely used standard.

As I mentioned, these are just a few mistakes in poor web page design.  If you have others, please share!  As you surf the web yourself, keep a list of annoying things you find on other sites.  This is a great way to reexamine your own site to see if you have the same problems. Regardless, if you avoid the common web page design mistakes listed above, you will stand a better chance of running a successful blog.