Blog Author Vs Reader
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If you’ve been visiting this blog regularly since past 25 days, you may have seen the constant changes to the blog theme. We have gone from a ready made theme to a custom theme with various features and functions.
The Problem With Designing a Blog Theme
What Readers Want:
- Good content without distraction.
What Bloggers Want The Readers To Do:
- Read the blog posts
- Navigate through the blog and read all my posts
- Subscribe to the RSS feed
- Forward the blog posts to various social websites
- Make comments
- Click on ads
- Buy me a beer
- Buy my products and services
All these to-do functions clutter the blog. Create distractions. Make the readers exit the blog. So I’ve been silently testing the best blog layout that optimizes readership as well as gets readers to perform all the various functions we bloggers want them to. Finding the balance hasn’t been easy. But I think we are 90% of the way there.
I’ll be revealing what you should do to create the most effective blog theme in my next post.
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Looking forward to that post!
What are your thoughts on three-column designs? Better yet, how do they really stack up against single sidebar designs? Any good, hard data?
Thanks!
I love your plugin … just found it today.
Posted 14 Jun 2007 #
Hi Bruce,
Thanks for reminding me. I have a draft on the topic which is half completed. But somehow, never got around to finishing that post.
I’m not a big fan of 3-column blogs. Especially those blogs that have the 2 smaller columns adjacent together. (Yours is a bit better with the wider column in the middle - coming in between the 2 thinner columns.)
My experience and test results show: the more links that you provide to your readers, the lower the overall click through rates will be. Yes it sounds paradoxical, but its true. The more links you offer, the less people will click.
With 3 columns where two columns are together and choke full of links, people will just ignore the columns.
I’ll make a comprehensive post sometime early next week in more detail.
Posted 15 Jun 2007 #
Good insights, Ankesh.
By the way, my suspicion is that your Subscribe To Comments plugin is not working. It apparently has a problem with 2.2 — that is the reason it is currently disabled on my site.
I was not notified of your reply: I just happened to check back here. You might want to google for probs related to the plugin … it apparently does not notify people when working within 2.2 … last time I checked the plugin author’s site, he had been made aware of the problem but has not fixed it yet.
I like your site. Glad I found it.
Posted 15 Jun 2007 #
Thanks Bruce for the heads up. Didn’t realize the subscribe-to-comments plugin didn’t work. Will see if I can find / create a fix.
I’m glad you found this blog too
Posted 15 Jun 2007 #
I found that site for this question
Blog Author Vs Reader
Posted 09 Jul 2007 #