Blog designs and websites come in all shapes and sizes. Plus 15 tips to capitalize on your layout.
I have been on the search for advice on monetizing my blog designs and web templates.
I don’t just mean the most elegant looking of blog designs, but a template that is designed to get the most out of the traffic that my website and blog may get. So, in the nature of GuruBloggers, I thought I would share with you some of my findings…
Study on blog designs and websites
This is a screen shot of a study done on blog designs and website layouts with eye tracking software. The colors represent areas of where random people’s eyes concentrate on while viewing different blog designs and website layouts. The red area represents where eyes view the blog designs content, and where blog designs get the most attention. The yellow comes in next, with blue being last and rarely viewed with any attention at all.
On the far left, we have one example of many blog designs that is a text rich piece of content. We can see where the content has nearly all the web surfer’s attention. Notice the where the red is concentrated the most, this is how much focus the article actually received. Keep your content short but keep it interesting and do a soft sale in the last 100 words!
In the middle we have a website that has banners, a large image placed on top, an ad on the top far right and the content in the middle. Notice how the most concentrated on part of the content only shows red at the beginning of the lines— this means the content is barely looked at the further right and down as the text in the article continues…
On the far right, we have a search result screen shot from Google. This shot is probably the most important reason we blog, work and play on social media, as well as spend time and money on enhancing the SEO on websites. This shows where people pay most attention to in the search engines, and it’s not the ads on the far right. It is the organic search results. It seems to be a familiar result, I too often look to the first 3 results in Google!
15 tips to know about websites and blog designs.
- Text actually captivates an audience more than pictures.
- People begin viewing websites from the top left, much like a book!
- Banners often get ignored.
- Don’t use fancy fonts in blog designs, people tend to ignore those too.
- Lower parts websites are usually just scanned, so keep the good stuff at the top.
- Short paragraphs will keep your audience’s attention, keep it around 300 words.
- Blog design and websites with the ads on the top or left part of the content to get the most views.
- Place ads in your content or right below and get more views.
- Big pictures catch more eyes than smaller ones.
- Headlines draw attention and make your pieces more credible and convincing. Choosing the right CSS for blog designs can make a headline really stand out.
- Web users spend more time navigating menus of blog designs and looking at the buttons of a website.
- Bullet points are better at keeping readers’ attention compared to large paragraphs the also.
- Some will skip large chunks of text.
- Nothing wrong with white space! It helps blog designs stay neat and organized.
- Place menus on the top part of a website, web-surfers are used to looking up for navigation.
While we may not implement some of these tips here on GuruBloggers, it is nice to know for our clients’ blog designs and we like to share information that we find even more! So when you in the creating process, keep all of this in mind to make the most out of layout!
Be on the look out for blog designs and web templates from GuruBloggers for you to download!
Sources: BBC News | GoogleBlog | DreamGrow
