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Is Your Design Strong Enough to Support Your Readerbase?

Posted on June 18th in Ramblings — 3 Comments so far. Got something to say?

I’ve mentioned several times before, something that really promotes growth and the ability to grow is a good design. It really boils down to the quality of your design versus the quality of the content. You could write great content only to put it on a design that will never get you noticed.

There are two times in one’s blogging (this will be referring to blog designs throughout) ‘career’ as it were that you need a really great design. The first time is when you are just starting out, which is possibly the hardest time for a blogger. Thinking you can post everyday and develop a huge blog like the ones you read is only 1% of the battle. You may write great stuff, but if nobody reads it, then what? Getting over that first step is crucial not only to further growth, but to your confidence as a writer.

There are a few ways starting out to really get read, but in hindsight it comes down to just getting your self out there. Traffic, while not easy to obtain at times, is the key to getting a consistent readerbase. If you get yourself out there, some people will notice, and eventually you’ll start to ease over that first hump. Back to the design, including a couple more things, there are many ways for a quick burst of traffic that you may (or may not) find some loyal readers in:

CSS Galleries, if your design is up to it.
Release an unsponsored, free WordPress theme.
Post in forums, and advertise your sites in your signature.
Ask for reviews of your sites.
Comment on other blogs.
Email other bloggers.
Sign up for all the popular services: Technorati, FeedBurner, Twitter, etc…

You can go from no where to widely read in all of a couple weeks. I, personally managed to do it the hard way. By ‘hard way’ I mean I just sort of wrote every now and then, and eventually picked up to writing everyday, doing all I could. But, after a while I just stopped trying so hard, stopped writing link bait (worked once, though) and just wrote about the stuff I was passionate about and knew about.

In hindsight, it sounds easy with all those things, but still it’s really not. I just can’t emphasize enough about quality content and a strong aesthetic presence to get started. Imagine your site with thousands of readers, millions of hits a month, and realize it just takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight, unless you’re FreelanceSwitch.

The other time is one that can happen really as many times as you want through aforementioned ‘career’. This is when you want to take the next step up and start improving on the statistical side of things. It’s no crime to want more traffic, readers or recognition -we all do.

These two times are when you really need to have a great design, because no matter how eye catching your headline is, how perfect your copy is or how much effort you put into writing, no one cares if your site is ugly. Sounds blunt, but take it seriously. Hard to read also qualifies as ugly, because it has the same effect on people.

On a side note, Henry Legge, aka L3ggy my obsessive spam commenter released his new site today, and took it upon himself to make a FireFox plugin to search this site, right from your browser!