I presented this at Blogalicious 2010 in Miami to highlight best practices for creating a site that people want to visit and return to. During the session, I did live site reviews and provided feedback on how attendees could improve their sites

1. Is Your Blog Design Killing
Your Visitor Traffic?
Adria Richards, @adriarichards
Freshworkshops http://freshworkshops.com

2. Adria Richards
Technology Trainer
@adriarichards
San Francisco, CA
Is Your Blog Design Killing Your Visitor Traffic?

3. Today We’ll Cover
Why your blog design matters
Evaluate good blog site designs
Tools to measure blog performance

4. Blogs: The Good
Promote product, service or opinion
Easy, fast and low cost
Centralized location to engage

5. Blogs: The Bad
Oatmeal: How A Web Design Goes Straight To Hell
HTTP://THEOATMEAL.COM/COMICS/DESIGN_HELL

6. Bad Blog Design
Low traffic
low engagement
Low page rank

7. What is Beautiful Is Useful
In the main study, 588 participants asked to judge
the expected information quality of 12 websites.
A positive judgment of the visual appeal was
consistently transferred to a positive expectation of
the information quality of the site
SOURCE: HTTP://WWW.COMPUTER.ORG/PORTAL/WEB/CSDL/DOI/10.1109/IPCC.2009.5208678

8. 3 Good Blog Designs

9. HTTP://CHICJONESMEDIA.COM/

10. HTTP://AFROBELLA.COM/

11. HTTP://BLOG.2HARVEST.ORG/

12. Making The Blog
Design
Content
Visitor Experience

13. 5 Reasons People Surf The Internet
1. Find answer their question
2. Research a specific product or service
3. Research your company
4. Buy a product or service
5. Entertainment

14. Design
The look and feel of the site plus functionality

15. Platforms
Wordpress
Bloggers
TypePad
MoveableType
Posterous
Tumbler

16. Average Blog Template

17. Blog Design Options
Free theme ($0)
Buy them ($30 - $200)
Custom built theme ($800-$3,000+
Or code it yourself ($0)

18. Content
Provide unique, value focused content that
encourages readers to link, bookmark, tweet and
share your content
Use photos and videos to bring your blog posts to
life
Reference other blog posts on the topic that rank
well

19. Visitor Experience
How do people feel after visiting your blog?
How do they explain your blog to others?
What’s in it for them to come back?

20. Tools: Measuring Traffic
Google Analytics
Compete.com
Alexa.com

21. Tools: Google Analytics
HTTP://WWW.GOOGLE.COM/ANALYTICS/

22. Tools: Compete
HTTP://COMPETE.COM/

23. Tools: Alexa
HTTP://WWW.ALEXA.COM/

24. Summary
Understand good site design
Image and video rich blog posts FTW!
Measure and analyze your traffic

25. Questions?
Is Your Blog Design
Killing Your Visitor Traffic?
Adria Richards
Technology Trainer
@adriarichards
http://butyoureagirl.com
http://freshworkshops.com