Tips To Work On Your Website Blog Design That Will Make It More Engaging

Recently we covered an article on the ways to improve the bounce rate of a website by working on the UX design. A blog is one of the most essential sections of a website and contributes immensely to the amount of traffic hitting the website. 

Therefore, it is imperative that the blog page is designed with utmost attention and precision; in order to make it more engaging and increase the time a user spends on your website. 

A great business blog is a staple for driving new users to your website who seek knowledge and answers to the questions they have. It’s full of expert insights and information that’s valuable to your audience, which ultimately helps drive sales to grow your business.  

While consistently creating content is a crucial part of making sure you’re educating your audience, simply having the content isn’t enough. You need to make sure you’re finding and digesting this content is as easy as possible. 

To help shape and optimize the readability of your content, you need it to be facilitated by a blog design that enhances the reading experience and highlights the most important information. It needs to be able to draw customers into headlines, entice interactions, optimize for conversions, and create a lasting impression.

So, we decided to dedicate this blog to help you identify some helpful tips to improve your own blog page design. 

Website blog design tips for higher engagement

Include enough white space

Your content is the most important part of your website, but when it looks better your visitors will value it more highly.  

Consider adding white space to your website. Cut unimportant texts and widgets out of your home page. You don’t want to bombard your visitors with information. Add white space around important parts of your website to highlight them.

 

Keep your blog light in size

What we mean by this is that, it is highly advised to keep you blog light in size by using optimized images and other multimedia (if used any).

Larger webpages are bad for both users and site owners as they cause slower performance and larger bandwidth costs. Performance issues are a problem particularly for mobile device users, for whom a larger website can take many seconds to load.

One of the most common causes of slow performance is images. When low-bandwidth devices access your website, the images on your website with resolutions for a desktop monitor will load slowly and unnecessarily increase your bandwidth costs. 

Use gzip to compress your website’s resources. Check your JavaScript and CSS code to remove any redundant line breaks. See if you can take out any page elements you don’t need. 

 

Make your blog content a ‘knowledge center’

One of the highly rated advices for a better blog design is organizing the content into a knowledge center.

Aside from ease of reading, a cumulative learning center approach makes it more likely your user will spend more time on your site since the barrier of finding what they want has been decreased significantly. 

This will, also, likely result in an increase of your pages per session; which Google uses as criteria when ranking your site. The higher pages per session, but better your ranking. 

 

Make the blog design mobile-friendly

As more and more people are browsing their internet on their phones and tablets, many companies and individuals have adapted their websites accordingly. And, it is what users expect; the websites to be optimized for mobile viewing. 

If you don’t do so, don’t expect visitors to stick around for very long. It is very difficult for viewers to navigate through websites that aren’t mobile-friendly. 

They have to zoom in to see your text at all and then constantly scroll left and right to continue reading. Or, they may not be able to zoom in at all. They might accidentally click on the wrong link. 

All in all, it’s a headache that few are willing to endure.

 

Keep the text left-aligned

One of the most overseen fact about the blog design is the alignment of the text. If you are thinking of keeping your blog text centrally aligned, DO NOT DO IT!

Not just that centered text is for headlines, billboards and advertisements but, also it just isn’t a smooth transition between lines. 

Each time your eye moves to a new line, it has to struggle to find the start (because it’s never in the same spot twice), which makes it uncomfortable to read large chunks of text. 

Additionally, you may choose to go with justified text alignment, which may be better than centered, but justified text has its own problems—especially on the web. 

A reader uses the right length of a line to help them identify where they are in a paragraph. Justified text means re-reading the same line multiple times, which we all know can be frustrating. Also, to make text justified spaces are put between words, which causes “rivers” (areas of white that flow throughout the paragraph) which disrupts the reader.

So, to make life simpler for everyone, just go ahead and left-align your text. 

 

To conclude…

Sometimes it’s tempting to think that we just need to focus on good content and the rest will take care of itself.

Well, that’s not really true.

In fact, your blog’s design, look and feel plays a huge role in how people interact with your written stuff. 

If your blog is ugly or out of date you might find that people don’t actually read what you’ve written, no matter how amazing it is.

GraphicsZoo can help you create amazing blog designs for your website. Learn more by speaking with our advisors at support@graphicszoo.com