At the beginning, most bloggers design their own websites, as they don’t have the budget to invest in a professional designer. While there are many tools out there to make building a website easy, there are still lots of common mistakes that are often made in web design by novices. If you want to make money with your blog, you should try to avoid these mistakes if you can.
Image – free for commercial use
Too Much Going On
Put your most important information upfront on your website. Visitors who can’t understand what your blog is about within a few seconds of landing on your site will just leave. This is important, but some bloggers try to cram too much information above the fold. An overcrowded website is never a good thing. A lot of images, text and other things all competing will take longer to load, and will confuse your visitors. Avoid a busy design.
Too Little Going On
Websites that have next to nothing on them are on the other end of the spectrum. Minimal design is trendy, and when done correctly, it looks great. However, some bloggers leave too much to the imagination. This is another common mistake. Your visitors want to know who you are and what your blog will do for them. Don’t rely too much on simple imagery with no clear direction as this will leave your visitors guessing. Read ‘What is jamstack all about?’ to learn more about building a simple, but not too simple, website.
Too Confusing
Somewhere in between doing too much and too little is a confused brand. A confusing site uses a variety of typefaces, images, colours, and themes, none of which really go together. This can happen for a few reasons. It can happen if you don’t have a clear idea of your brand. It can also happen when you like a few design templates and want to use them all. It can also occur when you are trying to get across too many ideas at once and see your site as too many individual components, rather than as a whole. When you design your blog, choose one theme, one logo, and one typeface, and stick with them across your whole site.
A Bad CTA
Your CTA is the gateway to your blog. It tells your visitors to do something: ‘read this,’ ‘sign up for my newsletter’, ‘follow me on Instagram’. It’s important that your CTA clearly tells visitors what they should do. There should be enough information that visitors know what they are going to get from taking action.
There’s a fine line between being helpful and being annoying. Keep CTAs concise and tell visitors exactly what to do. Keep any form-filling to a minimum and let people browse for a few minutes before a CTA pops up.
If you’re going to build your own blog, it’s a good idea to learn some basic web design so you can avoid some of these common mistakes, and make a beautiful blog.
Collaborative Post
