New and returning are two very different types of visitor to a blog. One has been here before and knows the drill; the other is still wondering if they’re even in the right place. This is the most basic, but the most important distinction between visitors in your audience.

Why then, would we treat them the same?

The answer is that if we had an easy choice, we wouldn’t. But we don’t have the luxury of such choice. It would take a complicated setup to serve two different pages to new and returning visitors, and might merely confuse your visitors.

Instead, we can use an easier method. We use our regular home page for our regular visitors, and link to a special made-for-newbies page, for the newbies.

As bloggers, we all want to put as much content as we can on the page, but make it look like as little as we can.

It’s an interesting paradox, which doesn’t always have an answer.

In certain circumstances however, there are indeed ways of cheating the rule, and serving your readers better by doing so.

In this article, I will talk about the 5 main options available to you, and by knowing them, you might find ways to apply them to your own blog.

In the past few days, I redesigned my sidebar. It doesn’t sound like much, does it? But looking back, that one change has had quite an impact on the overall look.

In blogs in particular, the sidebar is a big part of your design. But also in blogs, they tend to be quite poorly done. The reason is that very few of us design our sidebars with content in mind.

I’m guilty as well. When I first designed the sidebar for this blog, I was thinking about leaderboard ads and various widgets. Since then, I’ve dropped the ads, changed the widgets and added a sideblog.

Odds are, your sidebar content has changed in the course of your blogging as well. It is important to reassess your entire blog every now and again, but the sidebar is one area that you should pay particular attention to because of its changing nature.

In this post, I want to go through how I reassessed mine, and worked to improve it. You can then apply the same process to your own blog.

Minimalism is a big craze at the minute. Think for a moment; how many pure white designs did you see online today?

There are good principles underneath this all of course, and most likely you already know them.

Minimalism = Less clutter = Less distractions = More time focusing on the important stuff.

But do all minimalist designs work with this principle in mind? Do you not feel that in some cases, a designer has just thrown a few divs together and dubbed his theme minimalist?

It’s very easy for little mistakes to creep up in your blog. Small things that ordinarily, you wouldn’t look near. But a little mistake can have a big effect on how a person sees your site.

Do You Live in the Past?

How many web sites have “© Copyright 2008 Blog Name” in their footer? But does yours still say “© Copyright 2007 Blog Name?”

It’s a simple mistake to make (Why would you be reading your own footer?), but if a reader notices it, they’ll have a nice laugh at your expense.

Even the very best of us make mistakes, isn’t that right TechCrunch and Shoemoney?

Comments are one of the most important aspects of blogging, and something that all bloggers appreciate. And yet, comment areas are a typically boring affair.

By making commenting a more enjoyable experience, you will encourage more commenters to return to your blog to check up on previous comments, and to leave new ones.

Use A Visual Text Editor

The default comments field is boring, and quite limited. It is possible to write your own HTML tags in the comment, but that’s a nuisance that you won’t do often. It’s usually easier to just leave out the formatting, isn’t it?

NicEdit is just 30kb in size, and gives a full featured text editor. Check out the comments field of this post to see it in action. It’s much easier to format a comment this way.

For anyone; NicEdit.

This blog is roughly 5 months old now, meaning that 2007 was both its best year ever, and its worst year ever. All in all though, I enjoyed it.

As a last tribute to the year, I’d like to share with you some stats from the blog, highlight the best posts incase you missed them, and then make a few resolutions for the next year.

In 5 months I’ve written 83 posts, which have gotten a grand total of 1877 comments. That rounds off to 23 comments per post; a fact that I’m immensely thankful to you all for!

What’s more is that if I included all of the nice comments left by those chatty wee spambots, it would be 83 comments per post. Wow. Thanks spammers Akismet!