Connor Wilson » Blog Archive » Are YOU Holding Your Design Back?

Are YOU Holding Your Design Back?

Posted on June 19th in Design — 5 Comments so far. Got something to say?

Yesterday I talked about your design holding you back, but today I’m going to look at the opposite side of things. On this side, there are two positions. You either:

Aren’t a designer, but want the personal touch of your own design on your blog.
Have hired a designer and have a great design, but the content doesn’t back it up.

When to Outsource?

There is always a time to outsource. There are also times when you really shouldn’t. For example, you can put together a design, but it won’t look great, won’t be coded great and won’t seem complete. Do you no want your blog to be great? Yes, you do, just like everyone else who has ever signed up for a free blog on one of the million sites. They see Perez Hilton on TV and think, “I can do that!”

Unfortunately these people spend a couple weeks, maybe write a couple posts about how their day was and eventually leave an idle Blogger profile to die.

But you are obviously different. The fact that you’re reading this blog, specifically shows you likely come from the web development/design side of things and can achieve the objectives you have set out for yourself. So find yourself a reasonably priced designer if you aren’t one and get yourself a design that will launch your blog, not tie it up.

Furthermore, your platform can really hold you back. If you work on a custom written one, make sure you write the features that other platforms utilize, like trackbacks, tagging, administration, etc… If you can’, or just don’t want to, then make the move to an open source platform that you cans till make your own, but still have a solid foundation of features.

Personally, I use WordPress because it has everything I’ll ever need in a CMS and is infinitely extensible. Having worked with WordPress for some time, I can create custom themes and modify existing ones to my liking. My platform doesn’t hold me back, and I can trust WordPress to never do that (as long as you stay on top of your security updates).

Content Not as Good as Your Design?

No matter how great your design, quality content is, and always will be the number one contributing factor to how well your blog does. Even with quality content, it takes patience to find readers and develop traffic. The fact that you have a good design, but people are not staying to read, subscribing or returning means your content likely isn’t up to par with what they want.

Trying to find out why your own writing isn’t very good is pretty hard for someone to do, and few people in the world can be that objective. You wouldn’t keep writing everyday if you thought it wasn’t good, right? Try asking some other people for their blunt, honest opinions. Whether you have some friends you can ask via IM or you email some fellow bloggers to give you a short response, you need to find the root of your problem.

If you want to cheat, the problem is that you’re trying to hard. Every blogger goes through the stage where they want to go from 10 readers to 10,000 overnight and so they write link bait and venture into areas that they can’t write very well.

The solution? Simple: just stop trying so hard. It may seem stupid, but if you’re pressed for topics, don’t write everyday. Write about the stuff you know about, and can form a full, meaningful and helpful post on.

It’s in the Combination

The combination of quality content and a good design is what the huge blogs so popular today. A good design doesn’t have to be graphics heavy, complex or “web 2.0″, it just has to work for your site.