With the number of blogs increasing by the day, having a good blog design distinguishes your blog from other blogs. The first impression a visitor has when he or she comes to your blog plays an important role.

You have to ensure that you captivate such a person in a way that they will return. While content is what brings them to your blog, your blog design can send them packing without looking back.

Therefore, if a good blog design is essential to your business, what features should such blog have to ensure your audience stays behind and read your content?

In our previous post, we expound on planning your blog. So far, we have gone through a lot that involves building a successful website. Here are the lessons we’ve talked about in this series on building a successful blog for your business.

How to create a successful blog – Part 1
How to create a successful blog – Part 2
Planning for your successful blog

Here are some features that make a good blog design

Good Readability

Readability is a crucial feature to consider when you want to create a blog. You must ensure the text and background colour are in harmony. In addition, you need to break down your content into various sessions, which must include headers, paragraphs, and bullet points.

Ensure there is adequate space to make your content easy to read. The standard for web font size is between 12-14px with images to give the audience a picture of what they are reading.

Integration with Social Media platforms

A good blog design must include social media widgets to encourage visitors to share your content with their audience. Although there are many social media integration items to add to your blog, you shouldn’t overdo it as it will clutter your blog.

Ensure to include popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, etc.

Good blog design requires useful Sidebars

Sidebars are an essential aspect of your blog design because it gives visitors a flexible way to navigate through your blog or website. A proper sidebar will have an easy to use, flexible navigation, attractive design, and feature content. If you are contemplating on the essential sidebar to use on your blog, here are a few to include in your blog.

• Recent posts
• Popular posts
• Category Links
• Recent comments
• Link to RSS feed

A catchy Header

Imagine seeing this image above as the feature image with the title. What will be your thought if you were the reader? Firstly, you will think if the writer knows what he is talking about because it doesn’t make sense?

Secondly, you will ask yourself a question, why get married if I should remain single? The statement seems contradictory from all angle. With this, you become curious as to know what the content is all about. The header becomes a luring point that gets you to click.

Attracting attention to your blog is one of the goals of having a blog. Your header or heading is an attractive feature that attracts your audience. Your header is the hook that draws them to your blog. Make the header memorable for your audience. Whatever colour you decide to use for the header, it should match with your content and blog theme.

Use Meaningful Images – Good blog design

Another critical feature of good blog design is images. Images help improve the appearance of your blog. Assuming you use the image as the feature image, does it make any sense? If you observe, the title of the content and image doesn’t correlate.

Anyone that sees that image will know that it is about the financial market. However, your content depicts something else. Your image must match your content.

Every post should have a meaningful image that relates to your content. It should give your audience a sense of what you are discussing. You can’t talk about shoes and place an image of a bird flying.

What if your content is dealing with numerical data? Well, you can take advantage of graphs and charts to illustrate your point. It makes it easier for your audience to get a picture of what you are presenting to them.

What more?

Beyond what you have read, there is a lot to do if you want a good blog design, but these are the topmost to help you stand ahead in this race of content marketing.

Remember to hire a writer if you don’t have the credentials for content writing. However, you need a reputable content writing services to help implement a good SEO practice that will get your website noticed.