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?

A few weeks ago I ran an offer where I would give 5 free tips on anyone’s blog’s design. The offer went down very well, and I’d like to share some of what I have learnt so far.

Every design is unique of course, however, there are some small flaws that I found to be common across quite a number of blogs.

The 5 Pointers

1. Take care with your logo. A fast-loading blog is important, but not everything is worth forsaking for its sake. In particular, a lot of bloggers have compressed their banner images to a point where pixelation around the letters is noticeable. Your logo is too important for this.

Many WordPress users have been finding that a large number of the plugins they have tried to install in their sidebars lately aren’t working. In most cases, this is purely because your theme is widgetized.

Widgets were originally a plugin that allowed you to easily edit your sidebar content. As of version 2.2 of WordPress, it comes as default. Widgets can be very useful, but they have caused some people some trouble. Thankfully, there is an easy solution.

The Problem With Widgets

The problem is that some people forget about widgets when they add their plugins.

Photo by TonivS Every free template includes the author’s name near the content of each post. You would have to look hard to find one that didn’t. But why should you keep the name there?

Single and Multiple Authors

The purpose of giving the name so close to a post is to give credit to the person who wrote that post. This is important in multiple-author blogs where the author changes from post to post. Regular readers will be interested to know who is writing which posts, and the writers deserve credit for their work.

However, in a single-author blog, the author does not change from post to post. Regular readers do not need to be told your name over and over again as they know it already and can assume that the writer hasn’t changed.

Arguably, the most important feature in your blog’s design is its usability. Can the reader get what they want? A large part of that is giving them the space to manoeuvre unhindered by clutter and superfluous gadgets.

In order to keep your blog clutter-free, you must be ruthless with your sidebar content. There are thousands of Wordpress plugins available, and it is very tempting to install them all. The wise blogger knows to add only the options which will be beneficial to the user, which begs the question;

How are the monthly archive links useful?

In most cases, they aren’t. The monthly archives are a remnant from when blogs were literally online diaries. When the posts are a biography of someone’s life, then it can indeed be very interesting to look back to what they were like in the past. The monthly archives were also a lot less hassle than properly categorising posts.

Feedburner provide a free service, whereby they monitor a number of stats about your RSS feed, as well as offer a few other tweaks (Like the email subscription option we offer here). All of these services are fantastic, yes, but arguably the coolest offering Feedburner has is the little subscriber count button. But what do you do when you don’t want your readers nosing into those stats?

NB - This method will only work for Wordpress users.

Why Is the Subscriber Count Button Useful?

1. The statistic itself is a valuable one. The subscriber count tells you how many people have decided that what you write on your blog is important enough for them to read it regularly. There are many other ways of judging a site’s success, each with their own drawbacks, but for a blogger, what could be better than knowing that someone out there considers your writings to be worth reading?