From the content to the layout and design, a business blog should accurately portray your brand message while keeping readers continuously interested and loyal. If your blog content or design is stale and no longer an accurate portrayal of your brand image, it’s time to consider a major makeover. When there is a disconnect between your message and what you are portraying, you run the risk of losing your targeted audience and key influencers.

Below are 4 blog elements to consider changing:

Design / Theme: If you’ve had the same blog theme for a year or two now, it’s time to update your look. When brainstorming how you want your new blog design to look, consider how your brand story has changed / developed over the past year or two. Your company might have drastically evolved from what it once was. Your blog design should reflect this new image and express it accurately.

If your current theme is too difficult to customize or you need a skilled programmer to do so, then search for a new blog theme. If you plan on blogging for years to come, then it would behoove you to consider purchasing a highly customizable and user-friendly theme such as Thesis or ProPhoto. The amount of time and money you save in the long run with one of these platforms is huge-trust me.

When you use a Thesis or ProPhoto theme, you don’t have to hire an IT professional to customize the coding. These themes’ dashboards have easy-to-use features that enable you to customize your blog’s colors, design, layout, and fonts. You don’t even have to be tech-savvy to use them. And, you can change these elements whenever you want a fresh look, without having to constantly switch your blog to a new theme or hire a programmer.

Sidebar: Nothing is worse than an overcrowded, outdated sidebar. Many times, bloggers will continue adding items to their sidebar without deleting old items. I call this sidebar hoarding. Weed it out, if you haven’t done so in a year. Many times, the links on your blogroll will be inactive, or they won’t be in line with your current blog purpose. Or, you might have another blogger’s widget on your sidebar that doesn’t make sense to have.

Always take into account the needs of your blog audience. Every element on your sidebar should be active and pertain to their needs or interests.

Layout: Your layout should be set up in a way that complements your target audience’s online reading style. For example, if your target market is constantly on the go, you might consider changing your layout from full-length posts to excerpts in magazine style. Or, if you find that there is a high click-through rate on your sidebar, you might want to add a second sidebar to increase features for readers to click on.

But no matter what your layout looks like, it should always be easy to navigate and user-friendly. In fact, according to a recent study by Eyetrack III, navigation features located at the top of a web page receive more attention than if they are located somewhere else on the page.

With proper, easy-to-use navigation, you reduce your chances of having visitors leave due to frustration. Make your navigation bar as obvious and user-friendly as possible to ensure that blog visitors can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.

Content / Blog Copy: Take a look at your blog post topics for the last month. Do they all sound similar? What about the month before? Now, look at your blog readership. Has it decreased or stayed the same? If so, it’s time to freshen up your content and start raising awareness about other topics of interest pertaining to your blog purpose.

A great way to prevent repeating post topics is to create a blog editorial calendar that outlines posts for the month. This makes it easier for you to compare topics from month to month and gauge your target audience’s interest in particular topics.

By Michelle Salater

Whenever you’re creating a web design, do you always consider what your users want? If not, then it’s time that you start learning more about your target audience and understand their needs. After all, the main reason why you’re trying to come up with a good design is because you want to gain your audience’s attention and generate more traffic. And the only way you can achieve those goals is to think of what your users want and apply them in your web design.

Read the following information regarding your audience’s preferences and make sure you include them in your final web design:

Users Want Websites with Easy Navigation and Quick Loading Time
Online users are often very impatient, and this is probably because they’ve been accustomed to high-speed connections and easy browser experience. So if they encounter a website that difficult to view and takes too long to load, they will instantly be turned off and move on to the next site. That’s why you need to work on making your web layout more accessible to your readers. Be sure you add complete menus, search boxes, FAQs, categorized blog posts, site maps and other navigation tools for your visitors to use. Also, avoid using graphic effects like flash and JavaScript because they give your website a slow loading time.

Users Want Readable Fonts and Soothing Colors
One of the many things that users complain about on a website is the choice of the fonts and colors. It is very important that you select a font type and color scheme that’s soothing to the eyes otherwise your visitors will have a hard time browsing through the contents. Always use readable fonts, lighter backgrounds and darker font colors for your web design.

Users are Constantly Searching for Fresh Content
Designing a website is not only about being creative, but it also has a lot to do with writing relevant contents for your users. Remember that no matter how good your web layout is, it would be of no use if the news and articles you post are months or years behind. Therefore, you should keep putting fresh contents and updates on your website if you want to increase your online traffic and profits effectively. Do that and your users will surely love coming back to your website on a steady basis.

By Rob J. Lawrence