7 Necessary Key Elements of Blog Design

Blog DesignPeople blog to gain good readership, so that they can channelize the incoming traffic to their business website. It’s not a fool-proof approach. The journey is very long and definitely not an easy one. From creating a blog site to earning good search engine visibility, you have too many elements to focus. In this blog post, we will be learning about those few essential elements that should be a part of every blog design.

A perfect blog design should have the following components.

  • Snippets
    • If you go to Google search listing, snippets are the small description part of the website listings. Snippets are short and almost provide the actual solution for whatever the query would be. With rich snippets, people sometimes need not visit a website, as they would get answers on the search page itself or sometimes a CTA at the end of each blog will encourage them to read further.
    • If you are designing a blog site, then adding snippets should be your top priority.
    • Creating snippets of your blog posts and adding a CTA button would prompt better response from your readers.
    • Readers have an attention span of goldfish, and having a full post displayed is not a good decision as they prefer scanning through the topics, and any subject they find interesting they can always continue reading.
    • But push them with a long blog post; they may jump away from your website.
  • Threaded Comments
    • If your business has a blog, then it should have a commenting system and of course, the best one. It is common to find spams in blog comments, so managing comments around the posts is one of the toughest tasks, but is definitely worth the effort you put.
    • Generally speaking, comments social proofs your blog and attracts more traffic.
    • Disqus, Spot.IM, Facebook Comments, IntenseDebate are some of the popular commenting systems used in high-volume blog sites. But threaded comment system is one of the best. According to QuickSprout, blogs using this comment system can see the number of comments rising from 16% to 33%.
  • Scrolling Social Buttons
    • Naturally by adding social buttons on to your web page you are showing your credibility on social media platforms.
    • Social share buttons are available in both horizontal and vertical fixed positions. Use the floating social button plugin, choose the button you have to display, select the position of the button, and place it either on the top or at bottom of the content.
    • Scrolling Social Buttons
    • An advice for you,
    • Don’t add too many buttons, the users may get confused and that will affect your traffic.
  • Keep Font Size 11-Point or Larger
    • Is your blog site legible? Readable?
    • Report from WHO highlighted that approximately 3-5% of people around the world is visually impaired. Also, the number of users/website visitors doesn’t always belong to the younger generation. The demographic belonging to the age group of 50 or above may find it hard to read the text of smaller font size.
    • Also, it’s not only the font size; even the font type should be chosen appropriately to provide a comprehensive reading experience for the individuals of every age group.
  • Create an Archive Index
    • Have you seen a blogging site or any website that have a sidebar stating archives by month, sometimes even by year?
    • The section is designed so any reader who feels like accessing old content/blog should not feel lost filtering the whole website.
    • Now you want to design a blog site and you have designed one.
    • You keep adding new blogs every day, and luckily you even earned a good readership. To make sure that your reader is having a great experience, just add the archives so they would feel comfortable scrolling a large number of pages or navigate through older posts.
  • Add your Biography
    • Very less number of people blog as a hobby. Most of them do it to market their business. So when you have designed a blog site, it is most important you tell your readers about the author and that is you.
    • It is a kind of providing a backlink to your website. You write about yourself, your organizations, your goals, values, and stop; I think it will be sufficient to get the readers trust you and of course your work.
  • Include Email Subscription Options
    • You are reading a blog, suddenly a window pops up stating that if you sign up or subscribe you get to download a free e-book on digital marketing. I know you would happily give away your email address.
    • Likewise, use the same tactic for your blog site and earn a good number of subscribers and every time you can remind them about your new post.
    • More the number of subscribers better will be the incoming traffic.
    • And one more thing, now, this is important. You should not redistribute the complete blog through an email.
    • It should be kind of a teaser, if the subscriber wants to read further he should click on the link provided. Doing which, he would be redirected to your website earning you more traffic.