A Guide to Becoming an Infopreneur, Part 3
Written by: Don Miller
Posted on December 9, 2007
Filed Under Starting your Online Business
We have all heard the old adage you don’t get a second chance at a first impression. The look and feel of you site is very comparable. Selecting a theme for you blog with a look and feel your visitors will like is your next challenge. Making a selection that is functional, pleasing to the human eye and makes navigation throughout the site easy cannot be overlooked. Often times we will choose what we like and not what is good for us. Have you ever been faced with that kind of choice?
That First Impression
When a unique visitor comes to your site you may have only a few seconds before he or she decides to move on or stay a while. Think about how you browse sites and the ones that hold your attention. Personally I will stay away from what I call the Las Vegas strip look, filled with banners and bells and whistles. Remember you will be providing information. Steer their attention to your content. Check whether within seconds your visitor knows what your site is all about and what the name of the site is. Use the top logo image to present the reason for and identity of the site. Use the page headliners to say what that page is about. Remember to describe the slogan as “what’s in it for them.”
Color Scheme, Themes, White Space
The range of colors for your site design is limitless, but are they need. Do they prompt your desired response. Personally my desired response is a click within my site, and not away from my site. Loud colors and noisy design detracts away from you content in your case the information you are trying to share. Cleaning up your site of clutter is imperative if you want your visitor to navigate through your site. Adding lots of white space directs the attention to your content. One need only look at one of the biggest sites on the market to prove this theory, take a look at Google.
When I first started my blog I probably loaded 50 themes and settled on this one.
I thought it was nice, worked well with my version of WordPress and I was on my way, although I was constantly looking for something else. Now lets me show you how much a well designed theme can make a difference.
I switched out to Brian Gardner’s Vector Theme on November 29th. This theme added white space I never had on my site before. The first day I had a huge spike in traffic, which many bloggers experience when they change their look.
Now for the real difference. Until the change, each site visitor was looking at a bit less than 4 pages according to my stats. After the change that number swelled to 14 ! That means visitors were digging deeper into my site. Content was the same, but the navigation and layout made it easier to find it. The number seems to have settled now into the 10-12 range since the initial launch. Content is being read. Information is being processed, and hopefully readers are returning. My RSS subscribers increased 5 fold.
Free Themes or Custom Design
Free themes are everywhere. Custom designed are just as plentiful. I think much can be accomplished by using a free theme.
Heres is a list of a few free theme sites you can choose from
Here is a hint. Many of the authors of custom themes offer free themes on their sites as well, and may suffice your needs just fine.
I personally have decided on a custom theme, but with a caveat. I have decided to use it as incentive for a personal reward for taking my blog onto the next level. The goal is rather simple. I must be ranked in the Alexa 100,000 and I must have over 150 subscribers. It’s just a little self-motivation device I am using to work hard on my blog, add content daily and provide information worthy of my readers time.
Choose a theme and start building. The next post will deal with adding Content, lots of it. Provided you have chosen a niche that excites you, this may be the easiest part of blogging.
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Tags:blog, blog monetization, blogging, bz news, choosing a theme, learn to blog, monetization, Niche Blogging, seo, traffic, wordpress
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A Guide to Becoming an Infopreneur, Part 3…
We have all heard the old adage you don’t get a second chance at a first impression. The look and feel of you site is very comparable. Selecting a theme for you blog with a look and feel your visitors will like is your next challenge. Making a select…
I think that you need to find a good topic to write about, something that you already know about.Find out who your competition is and improve your writing and blog from theirs.
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce