I’ve done the homework for you so that you don’t have to! Let’s take your blog from bad to worse, like a slow train wreck, over the next 12 months. All you have to do is follow these 10 steps:
- Make a fake sticky note and coffee stain ring and use it all over your site. It shows you are sophisticated yet down to earth, friendly yet professional.
- Tell everyone something like “Hi. I’m Fred. I design beautiful websites.” That way, people will know that you are Fred, and that you design beautiful websites.
- Make sure all your fonts are being rendered in Typekit. Please use at least 9 different typefaces.
- Make a post about “25 minimal WordPress Themes”.
- Make a post about “15 amazing Photoshop Tutorials”.
- Litter your links, banners, footers, and text with important keywords every other word like “graphic designer” and “freelance”.
- Make sure you have huge, giant, really big, and easily clickable icons for Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds. They should be at least 1024 pixels wide each, have a drop shadow, and a little character pointing to them. That way, people will see the icons and not miss the icons.
- Include most colors from the entire visible spectrum in your design. Use some ultraviolet too so a visitor can see the site if they happen to be in a room with a blacklight.
- Find a very well-known blogger you like, and copy his or her site literally, down to the last pixel. It worked for them, it will work for you too.
- Very important: write an article about how to get freelance design work. It should say things like “ask your friend for business” and “print business cards” and “try and get freelance business”. Also, a good tip to include is “use the internet” to get freelance work. It’s amazing how many people miss that one.
Ok, that was sarcastic. Don’t do those things.
Instead, get a nice clean design and write in a personal voice and make sure you have 3 or 4 search engine things figured out. It’s worth reading Copyblogger.com and sites like that, but don’t go nuts. Just write good stuff and relax. Post frequently and you’ll be fine.
Blogging, whatever you blog about, is a chess game and not a game show: think then act.
Enjoy the game!
This article was inspired by:
- 2 Reasons Why Your Portfolio Site Sucks over at Drawar.com. If anything, Scrivs is opinionated. It works.
Haha.. Spot on!!
LOL
Some great tips there Douglas
I wonder how someone would feel if you’ve actually done all 10 steps on their site and then came across this post.
@ Paul:
I think the list is indicative of the kinds of things in general a new blogger might assume are the right things to do. While someone may not make the “coffee stain” design blunder specifically, you could substitute design-trend-x. I could have put, if I wrote this 2 years ago, “make sure you include rays of a rising sun in the background image of your blog template. It shows you are an optimist and that you have seen the sun come up before, which is important for graphic design.”
David Airey said, after all these years of blogging, he still feels like he’s just getting the hang of it. So if he’s still in school on this, we all are for sure. I’ve evolved this blog enormously in it’s 9 month life so far, and see where it needs to go in some areas that it is lacking now. But, “blog education” is very much iterative and evolutionary.
So having cast off at least a couple noob errors, I hope I can help someone else avoid a redesign and article purge that could otherwise be avoided.
@ Douglas:
It’s certainly a learning curve, an enjoyable one though. I’m sure I’ll look back in a years time and cringe at some of the choices I’ve made with my blog – but as you say, this is the evolutionary process of blogging.
Why is “get a nice clean design” so important?
I’m not saying “Comic Sans uber alles,” but why not a bit of dirt, or a smudge or two?
@ SlowX: Good catch – I chose a poor word. What I meant by “clean” wasn’t necessarily whitespace, but “clean” as in a metaphor for easily maintainable and not full of gratuitous eye candy that diverts your energy as a blogger from good content creation and into content presentation. The presentation is very secondary to the content. It’s important of course. But I’ve seen a zillion beautiful sites with the same “10 top wordpress themes” articles that every other beautiful site has. All that work to design something great and unique gets wasted on content that has no differentiation from any other startup beautiful blog! So sad that that happens, but it does, over and over.
@ Douglas: I agree with that.
It just saddens me a bit that more and more sites are looking like text books or The New York Times, and, well, I LIKE eye candy.
It’s all in the mix, eh?
Too much sugar or salt, and “yuck,” NOT “sweet AND sour.”
Although, OH YEAH, I too am tired of the “Top 10 ways to unclog your pocket juice” posts. Recently I read an article that says that’s a way to get more attention, by having “Top X…” in your title.
Instead, maybe I’ll just start blogging w/ my fly unzipped….cleanly.
@ SlowX:
List posts are a format of writing copy that will probably never, ever, disappear from blogs or adverts. They are very powerful in regard to getting attention. So use them, but have something to say once you get the eyeballs! People will always look – just don’t make them wish they didn’t after they do!
Ha Ha Ha. This post was amazing. Spot on in calling out most of the design blogs this day in age. There are a few rare gems out there, but this sums up a lot. Great read.
@ Lucas: It seems the speed at which self-imploding design blogs appear is increasing with each week! Unfortunate, but necessary I think. The best blogs out there are the ones that continually adapt, innovate, give opinion, and add value to resources like list posts, which we all love. But please, no more coffee stains and 3d twitter birdies! We get it already!
Glad you like the article – these kind are fun to write