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The following post is a guest post from the very talented blog designer, Peter Flaschner, as part of the blogging for beginners series.
Hi all. I’m Peter Flaschner, the founder and creative dictator at The Blog Studio. I’m going to walk you through the process we go through when designing a blog or other website. This is part one of two. When we’re done, we’ll have a super flexible WordPress theme perfect for anyone looking to make a buck with a blog.
Design can add tremendous value to a blog. When it comes to making money with your blog, proper web design can make a huge impact on your bottom line. For some reason, I get a lot of resistance when I say this. I think it has to do with one’s perceived definition of design. The typical response I get is ‘ugly sites do well with adsense’. That may very well be true. I bet though, that those same sites would do even better with proper design.
Before we get into this, I need to dispel one further myth: design is not about making things pretty. It’s about making things work to their best ability. Let me quote from dictionary.com:
- To formulate a plan for; devise: designed a marketing strategy for the new product.
- To plan out in systematic, usually graphic form: design a building; design a computer program.
- To create or contrive for a particular purpose or effect: a game designed to appeal to all ages.
- To have as a goal or purpose; intend.
- To create or execute in an artistic or highly skilled manner.
So, without further ado, let’s design a site. Here’s what we’re going to need: pencil, paper, and a graphics editor (such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, or Gimp).
We’re going to start by collecting a bunch of information. I know the instinct is to jump straight into your drawing program and start messing around, but it’s not the best approach. You’ll see why as we move through this.
We’re going to design a site for a fictional problogger. This person (let’s call him Fred) writes about watches. He’s earning a couple of hundred bucks a month from his current site, and wants to step that up.
Step 1: Identify the site’s goals (what are you trying to do? How will you achieve it)
We’re designing this site to increase Fred’s profit. We’re going to do this by designing a flexible framework for Fred to experiment with ad placement, by increasing the attention grabbing aspect in order to capture more first time visitors, and by increasing the site’s stickiness, giving users more chances to see an ad that they want to click on.
While we’re at it, we’re going to use a plugin we recently developed that will give Fred control over the colour of the various elements of his site. This way, he’ll be able to keep things looking fresh.
Step 2: Identify your audience (who are they, and where do they come from)
Fred’s audience is made up of two groups: hardcore watch nuts, who read Fred’s site for news and reviews of the latest timepieces, and people shopping for watches, who come to the site via searches for specific makes and models.
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