Chapter 54. Make Your Blog Design Work for You
Everything I've done with my blog design is intentional. I'm not saying that my blog design is perfect, and I certainly have other things I'd like to do with it in the future, but I want to share with you some thoughts about blog design, starting with my blog, then showing some design ideas from other sites as well. Why should blog design matter? Because you want your blog to serve the purpose you've built it to serve.
FIRST, KNOW THE GOAL
The goal of my blog is to provide you with a body of work on social software and the strategies surrounding it. One part of that goal is the hope that my work gives you starting points to launch out and do this on your own. The other part of the goal is to inform people, who need more than I've posted, that I'm available to help them with their specific needs. What do you think? Does my site match my goal?
What's the goal of your blog?
CONSIDER A THIN HEADER
When building the redesign of www.chrisbrogan.com, I wanted the header at the top to be very thin. I wanted you to be able to see as much of my page layout as possible instead of a huge static graphical banner at the top.
Check out Copyblogger and ProBlogger. Brian Clark and Darren Rowse have me beat on thin headers. They even have functionality alongside their names in the headers. Commercial concerns like TechCrunch and GigaOM[208] have ads at the top, but note how GigaOM handles ads. He's got it wrapped into the header, saving space. For whatever ...
Get Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to DevelopYour Business Online now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
