Why blog designs are commonly pretty gross

 The a**e end of a development process

Blog designs can come either as an after thought months or years after a web design project or at the end of the mentally draining process of website rebuild/redesign. For bigger sites, you may have a separate blog set up to the ‘main site’.

Also, ecommerce webmasters understand why their key landing pages need to kick ass from running email marketing and pay per click advertising – but might have no idea as to why they should blog and certainly how.

Should we have a blog? Yeah, we should. Surely its good to work out why? More importantly who’s responsibility is the difficult area of content strategy? With over 152 million blogs live on the internet, there’s most definitely a fair few dormant blogs with no direction, no fresh content…and a nasty design.

On one ecommerce website design project, we designed the blog first. Why not do that? Isn’t content marketing critical enough to ensure that your blog section is more than ‘Just another WordPress’. However, if the commercial reality within your organisation prevents you from doing this, here are some useful, practical pointers on making your blog design truly awesome and effective.

No matter when you get round to it, excellent blog design is all about making content accessible, easy to read, easy to share and really nice in mobile as you accelerate your social marketing efforts. Here’s a few slides that might help you in your blog design project: