How to start designing and optimising your blog

Here are design options for building your blog, in order from free/low cost to high cost:

• Pre-made layouts
• A WordPress theme provides all of the front-end styling of your WordPress site.
• Most WordPress themes provide:
• A WordPress theme provides all of the front-end styling of your WordPress site.
• Most WordPress themes provide:
• the overall design or style of your site
• font styling
• colours
• widget locations
• page layouts (or templates)
• styles for blog posts and blog archives
• additional stylistic details.
• Free vs. Paid WordPress Themes
• There are one thousand free themes from the WordPress Theme Directory
• If you choose to pay, Premium themes usually have a reliable code base and offer support if something goes wrong.

• Build it yourself
• Pros: 
  • Saves money, but can be expensive if it doesn’t perform well
  • Work at your own pace
  • You know your business best, so you can design your site to suit your needs

• Cons:

• Time consuming: It’s a good idea to decide beforehand what your time is worth. If your time is worth 40 EUR an hour, then how many hours can you spend on this project – not running your business – before you’ve actually wasted money on a ‘cheaper solution’?
• Background in marketing, website design, content creation and web development required. If you don’t have experience in these fields designing your site can be very challenging.

• Pay for professional help
• Pros 
  • Professionals know what they’re doing, and your website will portray this.
  • They have access to the tools, software, talent and information necessary to build a successful website.
  • You can focus on other things, giving you the time to get ready to launch your site.

• Cons
• Expensive
• Time-consuming to find the right party that will deliver what you want, in time.
• Dependent on the professional for maintenance and support

Basic design optimisation tips & tricks

1. Speed vs. ‘bells and whistles’

• Website visitors tend to care more about the speed of your site (load time) than all the bells and whistles of a professional-looking site.
• Did you know that, according to data from Akamai, if your website takes longer than three seconds to load, you could be losing nearly half of your visitors? That means that the faster the speed of your website, the more chance you have of increasing traffic. Optimising page load time leads to noticeable improvements in customer experience, conversion rates, and ultimately, your sales revenue.

• It’s also important to note that the less complex your site, the less chance of bugs popping up and slowing your business down.

2. Focus on usability

Making your site work for your visitors is the best way to reach your booking or conversion goals. To develop a user-centred design, you can focus on the principles of web usability outlined by industry leader Crazy Egg.

a. Availability & accessibility:

In short, if your website doesn’t work it becomes worthless.

• Server uptime: invest in good hosting to avoid visitors receiving an error when attempting to visit your website.
• Broken links: nothing sends a visitor back to google faster than a 404 page.
• Mobile responsiveness: allow for different screen sizes and slower connections.

b. Clarity: the goal of your website should be to help visitors reach their goals as quickly as possible. Too many distractions can lead to a bad user experience, causing visitors to leave dissatisfied with no intention of returning.

c. Learnability: People are familiar with standard design concepts used on different websites. By using these concepts consistently, you meet your visitors’ expectations. You help them reach their goals more quickly. If you do decide to use new concepts in your design, make sure to use them consistently and give people a hand during the initial learning phase

d. Credibility: It’s important that people know you are a real company with real people. Offer a clear ‘About Us’ page along with your contact details and (if possible) a physical address. Avoid grammar or spelling mistakes so your site appears professional.

e. Relevancy: It’s essential that you know your users and why they visit your site.

• Define who your visitors are
• Interact to determine their goals and when/why they visit your website
• Design your site based on different scenarios on why people visit your website. For example: if they indicate they’re looking for travel advice in North America, make it as easy for them to go to this section of the website and not be distracted by irrelevant content for other destinations.

Finally: test your decisions! Nowadays a range of tools for A/B testing, heatmaps, performance, web analytics, hosting and usability testing are available in different price and technical categories.