Everyday Randomness

7 Blog Must Haves

I think the Sunday Seven question this week is an interesting one. Patrick asks what are the seven “must haves” for your ideal blog design. I’ve given some thought to this question, and here’s what I’ve decided upon. These are in no particular order.

• Easy to read layout- This isn’t something that I want just because I want my blog to look nice. If my content can’t be read easily, readers won’t stick around.

• Widgets- Of course with Wordpress most of us prefer widgets.

• Sidebar layout- It’s a personal preference to how many columns you want in your layout, but I don’t want my sidebar to look “crowded”. I want my sidebar to have any easy to read layout of it’s own, or I want more columns so I can spread my content out.

• Easy to navigate archives- There’s nothing worse than visiting a blog I like, deciding to explore it further, and finding that the archives are a mess. I’ve also found a few free layouts before that were beautiful, but the archive layout looked like utter crap. I like the way my archives are with this particular layout. Instead of seeing the entire post, you get an easy to scroll through title listing.

• Ad integration- Almost everyone monetizes their blog in some form these days, and it’s essential to be able to integrate those ads seamlessly.
• Pages- Are the pages easy to find? Did your layout leave them out? Yet again I have ditched layouts in the past because I hated the positioning of the links for other pages.

• Correct rendering in all browsers- I can’t stand when I find the perfect layout, but then I discover it looks completely wrong in Internet Explorer. I use Firefox, but over 65% of my readers use Internet Explorer.

What are your seven must haves for great blog design?