Viewing Blog In Web Design 

As a blogger, I’ve often heard the phrase “Content is King!” We all know what it means - to become a more successful blogger, you need to create thought-provoking, useful, or just plain interesting content to engage your readers. Which is good, as far as it goes.

But what if you’re not getting the readers?

What if you’re traffic stats say you’re getting the hits, but their average ’stay’ time is a minute, or less? Are they really reading your content? What value is the content, when no one can be bothered to read it?

This is my first blog post at EarnersForum, and I will be writing about what makes casual browsers into customers – either of your products or your content.

Becoming successful on the internet used to be easy. Anything dot com used to attract massive funding, and permit you to have a first-class lifestyle on a third rate business idea. This was the dot-com boom that was followed, as surely as night follows day, by the dot-com crash. The dot-com emperor really did have no clothes. Wikipedia has a number of well-known “dot-bombs” as they call it: Dot-Bombs

Looking at Boo.com as an example (a company that ate, drank, flew and advertised its way through $120m-worth of funding), there were a number of reasons quoted for the failure, but most of them centred around the user experience. Slow internet connections, massive graphics, late delivery of website functionality, and massive over-estimation of sales targets meant the venture was doomed almost before it started. If you like gloating over other people’s mistakes, there’s some more on CNet.

How do you avoid these hugely expensive mistakes, and ensure that your online venture is successful?

Let’s take a first-time visitor. What does he/she see when the page resolves in the browser window? Is it a mish-mash of icons, graphics, fonts, images and colours? Or is it something pleasing to the eye? Let’s quickly compare a couple of websites.

Copyblogger is the online presence of Brian Clark. His writing is clear, and his ideas are inspirational. But what do you see when you load up his website? Loads of colours and nice graphics, and … wait a minute … is there writing in there? The only reason I chose this blog was because it used to be a paragon of the “easy read” virtue – clean and efficient. I understand that Brian needs to make some money, but in my opinion, his new scheme is not as good as the old. To see how it used to look, see the site of Chris Pearson.

For more visual inspiration, look at Elliot Back’s Website.

For my next blog post, I shall be writing about the specifics of website visual design, and the elements that will assist you in creating that successful online presence. After that, we’ll be looking at user behaviour when viewing websites.

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