Comment design can either help to give a blog theme a creative look, or it can be an afterthought that doesn’t get much attention during theme design and development. Avatars are now being used by a lot of bloggers (partly due to easy integration with WordPress) to make the comment section more personal and to encourage discussion.

In this post we’ll look at about 20 examples of blogs that are using avatars in the comments. Hopefully, these examples will give you some ideas in case you want to use avatars in your own work.

If you like getting design inspiration by looking at excellent blog designs, you’ll love our new gallery site Blog Design Heroes.

PSDTUTS

PSDTUTS, and the other blogs in the TUTS family, uses a speech bubble in the comment area coming off of the avatar of the commenter.

Freelance Folder

Freelance Folder was recently re-designed, and the comment area was certainly not overlooked. Alternating background colors are used, and trackbacks are also separated from comments.

Freelance Switch

Freelance Switch alternating background colors on comments, and the avatars are kept outside of the comment blocks. The default avatar is the familiar Freelance Switch illustrated character.

Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine is one of the few blogs that uses avatars to the right of the comment area. The avatars are smaller than on many blogs and they’re located in the row with the commenter’s name and the date/time.

Pro Blog Design

Pro Blog Design has a beautifully designed comment area. The speech bubble effect is used on comments and avatars have an attractive border added to them.

Blog.SpoonGraphics

Blog.SpoonGraphics uses a dashed border on avatars, as well as between comments. This comment design is less blocky than some others becuase it uses a consistent background color and no separation between comments besides the sublt dashed line.

Arbenting

Arbenting keeps each comment in a gray box, with the avatar sitting outside of the gray box and to the left. The avatars have a thin, solid border with a few pixels of padding.

Noupe

Noupe displays the commenters name at the left, above the avatar. The commenters URL than shows up above the comment, and comments are separated by dashed borders at the top and bottom of comments.

Six Revisions

Six Revisions uses a minimal comment design that includes the avatar above the commenters name, and not a lot of other design elements to style the comments. Comments are separated by dotted borders, but there are no blocks or alternating background colors.

Darren Hoyt

Darren Hoyt displays smaller-than-usual avatars above comments with a speech bubble effect. A dark background is used for all comments, except Darren’s.

Mostly Lisa

Mostly Lisa uses avatars to the left of comments with a speech bubble effect on the comments. Avatars have a thin, solid border and a gradient is used at the top of comments to give some added visual appeal.

Fuel Your Creativity

The comment area at Fuel Your Creativity is open, with no borders, blocks or alternating background colors to break things up. Avatars are shown to the left with padding, a white background and a thin, solid border.

Bittbox

Bittbox shows small avatars above comments and next to the name of the commenter with a solid gray border between the name and the comment. Alternating comments have a light gray background as opposed to white.

GoMediaZine

GoMedia uses alternating background colors on comments and gray borders to also help visually separate comments. The comments name is in a yellow/gold color, and avatars are to the left.

We Are Not Freelancers

We Are Not Freelancers keeps each comment in a box with a subtle background gradient. The avatars are to the left with a few pixels of padding and a light one-pixel solid border. The commenter names (linked to user-submitted URLs) use a thin dashed red underline.

ImJustCreative

ImJustCreative uses a unique comment design. Like Smashing Magazine, the avatars are placed to the right. The comment itself is kept in a box with a thin gray border, and above the comment is the commenter’s name, date and time of comment, and the avatar.

ColorBurned

ColorBurned features a dark background for the blog and the comment area. Alternating comments are distinguished by a slightly lighter gray background color. The comment layout is fairly standard with the avatar to the left and the commenter details above the comment.

Copyblogger

Copyblogger has one of the more well-known blog designs. The comment section includes a small avatar next to the commenter name, with comments in a gray speech bubble. Comment numbers are also shown at the top right.

Blog Herald

Blog Herald uses a rather open comment layout and design. The comments are on a white background, just like the rest of the site. Small avatars are placed in a box with a light blue background above the comment. This box also includes the commenter name/link and the date and time.

What Are Your Thoughts?

This post is intended just to provide a sampling of avatars in comment design. Feel free to mention other blogs that you think are using avatars effectively.

How do you feel about comment design and avatars? Do you feel that it is an important part of blog theme design? Do you prefer to comment on blogs that show avatars, or is it a non-factor?

For more posts on blog design, see:

• What Makes Good Blog Design?
• Category Hacks for WordPress Theme Designers
• Enhanced Sidebars with Dynamic Content
• Top 10 Tutorials for Developing WordPress Themes

If you like getting design inspiration by looking at excellent blog designs, you’ll love our new gallery site Blog Design Heroes.

One of the greatest benefits of blog platforms is that they make it easy to quickly get new content onto the site without the need to spend time on the design and layout of each page/post. Once the theme is set, all you have to do is create the content and hit publish. However, this can also be a negative as well. With the ease of publishing new content it’s extremely easy to overlook the importance of the design and it’s impact on the blog overall.

As part of the testing phase of theme development a considerable amount of evaluation should be done to help you to create the most effective theme possible. Additionally, it’s a good idea to periodically evaluate your existing theme to make sure it is still meeting your needs as well as those of your visitors. Because blogs are constantly changing and adding new content, you may find that occasional tweaks and updates to the theme are necessary.

Here is a checklist of items that I use to evaluate my own themes.

1. Is it search engine-friendly?

There is much more to Search Engine Optimization than just the structure and coding of a theme, but a solid foundation is a necessary starting point to maximize your impact in the search engines. A poorly coded theme can severely limit your reach to search engine visitors.

There is a very wide variety in terms of search engine friendliness when it comes to theme coding. Some are excellent, some are horrible. Unfortunately, most bloggers don’t pay much attention to this when they choose a theme. If you are paying attention and you’re using a theme that isn’t search engine-friendly, it is possible to improve this issue and continue using the same theme. For more information, see How to Create Search Engine-Friendly Websites from Cape Cod SEO.

2. How readable is the content?

The vast majority of blog visitors/readers will scan the page rather than read it word-for-word, and even if they are reading it word-for-word you’ll want to make that as easy for them as possible. Generally, dark text on a light background will be the most readable, and be sure to use whitespace, headers and sub headers, bold text, bulleted lists, and short paragraphs.

Some of the issues that affect readability will be influenced by the theme, and some will be up to the blogger creating the content. The theme should effectively use CSS to deal with headers and line spacing, and of course the text and background colors. List styles are also important. At the time of publishing a post you should make an effort to keep paragraphs from getting too long, to use bold text and lists, and to designate sub headers as such rather than just using bold.

3. How useful are the sidebars?

Sidebars are often an afterthought to both designers and visitors. However, their effectiveness can be improved with some thought and consideration from the designer to make them more relevant for visitors. The sidebars were a focus for me during the redesign of this blog a few months ago, and since I have made a few tweaks I have seen noticeable (small, but still noticeable) improvements with increasing pageviews per visitor and decreasing bounce rate.

Try to step back and look at your sidebar(s) from the perspective of visitors and think about what would be the most helpful content to include and what would get noticed. Sidebars are often neglected, and as a result they become stale and boring.

For more on sidebars, see Enhanced Sidebars with Dynamic Content and Effective Use of Blog Sidebars.

4. How will readers find your best content?

As a blog reader one thing I always like to see, especially when I’m visiting a blog for the first time, is a list of links to popular posts or to the best content on the blog. As a new visitor this gives you the opportunity to quickly evaluate the type of content you’re likely to find on the rest of the blog and it can help to make a decision about subscribing to the blog. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to gauge a blog based on one post, so these links can be a big help for new visitors. Also, repeat visitors may be returning to find a specific post that they saw at your blog, so why not make it easy to find those that they’re most likely to be looking for?

I’ve noticed on my blogs that a popular posts section in the sidebar does help to send a bit of traffic to these posts, although it does not send a huge amount of visitors. There are plenty of ways to show your most popular posts. You could manually create the list (like I have done on this blog), you could use a plugin.

5. How is the quality of design compared to other blogs/sites in the niche?

Of course, one thing you’ll want to evaluate is the overall quality of the theme’s design and appearance. This can be a bit tricky because everyone has different opinions and no design will be liked by everyone. Plus, you’re likely to be evaluating your own design, which is never easy.

Take a look around at other blogs in your niche and try to see how your theme stacks up. If you’re having a difficult time you could ask a friend for an honest opinion, or you could seek out some help and constructive criticism at a design forum.

6. How is the color scheme?

One aspect of evaluating the design as a whole is determining the effectiveness of the color scheme. Again, this can be very subjective, so it may be helpful to enlist the opinions of others. However, when dealing with negative responses from others, be careful not to go overboard and put too much weight in one opinion. Not everyone is going to like your color scheme, so try to get and idea of the general opinion and don’t change everything based on one person’s criticism (unless that one person is someone that you highly respect and trust).

7. Is the theme unique?

There are thousands of new blogs each day, and many have a very similar look. While you don’t need to create something that totally steps outside of the normal design habits for blog themes, there should be something unique that helps visitors to remember your blog and allows you to stand out in some way. You don’t necessarily need something that will wow visitors, but you should have a theme that will help for branding purposes and allow you to stand out from those using the popular free themes.

8. How quickly does it load?

With impatient visitors, load time is important. However, creating an attractive and interesting blog is also important. There are a number of highly successful blogs that have pages that load pretty slowly, and with increasing popularity of high speed connections, a little bit more liberty can be taken here. In my opinion, it’s good to evaluate the blog theme and see how it can be improved to create pages that load quicker even if it’s not making a huge difference. Creating pages that load in less time will only help your visitors.

9. Does it quickly communicate to new visitors?

One of the things I like to evaluate about a blog theme is how quickly new visitors can get an accurate idea of what the blog is all about. Ideally, within a few seconds of arriving at a new blog a visitor can identify the primary focus of the blog and get a good idea if it’s something that interests them. Don’t leave it up to your visitors to explore the site in order to find out what it’s all about, because very few will be willing to do this.

10. Is the comment section inviting?

Most bloggers like to get as much feedback and discussion as possible on their posts. This can be effected by the design and styling of your comments section. The comments are often not a major emphasis during theme design, but some creativity here can really help you to stand out. Take a look at this post with a mini-gallery of some examples of excellent comment design.

11. Are pages being used effectively?

WordPress theme designers have the opportunity to style pages differently than posts, although few actually do this. It may or may not be a good idea depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with your pages.

Regardless of how pages are styled, they can often be a simple way to improve the effectiveness of the blog. This borders on being outside the topic of theme design, but you can make a more effective blog and theme by using pages wisely. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has a nice post about 20 different pages that you can create for your blog.

12. How intrusive are the ads?

Most blogs now have advertisements of some sort, and blog readers have generally come to accept this as a standard practice. However, the ads can either have virtually no impact on the usability of your blog, or they can be extremely annoying for visitors who are simply trying to read your content.

One of my priorities when redesigning this theme was getting ads in a less intrusive location. When evaluating this issue you’ll have to keep in mind your primary goals with the blog and weigh your options. Personally, I don’t like to see ads with the content of the post, such as directly above or below the post title, but these are typically the most effective and most valuable spots for ads. You’ll have to estimate the impact your ads will have/are having on visitors to determine if that income is worth the cost.

How Do Your Evaluate a Theme’s Effectiveness?

Please feel free to share some of your thoughts on the subject as well.

Magazine-style themes, particularly for WordPress are very popular right now. The majority of premium themes for sale are magazine-style, and there are some very good ones. With the rise in availability and popularity of premium themes, magazine themes are also being increasingly common. A magazine theme can be a great option for building a website to utilize WordPress as a CMS rather than just a standard blogging platform.

Magazine themes open up some new possibilities to present content in ways that aren’t possible with the typical blog theme, and many bloggers are starting to use them for this reason. However, it’s not always an easy decision to know what type of theme would work best for your blog.

Reasons to Use a Magazine-Style Theme:

Excellent option for websites other than just blogs

Over the last few years WordPress has emerged as a legitimate CMS in addition to being a great blogging platform. However, most websites won’t work very well with a standard blog theme and layout, so the options are to have a custom theme designed or use a theme that is specifically created to suit the needs of a typical website.

When compared to standard blog themes, magazine-style themes are much more effective for traditional websites because of the presentation of content. Many magazine themes make better use of the page system in WordPress and there is more control over what content is featured rather than just having the latest post at the top of the front page.

Give a blog the look and feel of a larger site

We’re probably all familiar with the layouts that are commonly used by large news sites. Magazine-style themes can give a similar look to a blog, which can give the impression to visitors that the blog is larger. In some cases the standard blog layout can make it look deceptively small to new visitors. There may be hundreds of posts in a number of different categories, but the depth of the blog may be difficult or impossible to notice without digging deeper. A magazine theme can do a better job of communicating the size of the blog/site to new visitors.

Appearing larger may or may not be an attractive feature. For some blogs it really doesn’t matter, but for others it might.

Feature more content in a smaller space

One of the major advantages to magazine themes is that the front page will show more of the available content to visitors. For example, you may have sections for an excerpt of the most recent posts in categories A,B, and C. Images and links to all of these posts will be visible above the fold as soon as visitors arrive. With a standard blog layout they’re unlikely to see more than one post without scrolling down, even if you’re using excerpts.

Achieving this without creating a cluttered look is difficult, but the good magazine themes do it effectively. This can help visitors to quickly find what interests them, and it also gives the opportunity for some creativity in the design and layout.

Improves the Usefulness of Categories

Categories in blogs are irrelevant most of the time. The links often get ignored by visitors, and bloggers typically don’t use an optimal system for categorizing posts. Most Magazine themes are heavily dependant upon the category that a post belongs to. What’s shown on the front page will change if a post is moved from one category to the another.

Because content from a particular category will appear at a certain spot on the homepage, visitors become accustomed to looking in specific spots for certain types of content, thus making the categories more relevant. Additionally, this dependency on categorization can force the blogger to be more accurate and put more thought into the best ways to categorize content.

Improved control over what is featured

Standard blog themes will display content on the front page according to which posts were published most recently. While there are ways to exclude certain posts or categories from the front page, this functionality can be somewhat limited.

If you’re looking for more control, and easier control, over what is featured on the front page, a magazine theme may be a good option. Many magazine themes display a recent post from a “featured” category prominently on the page. In this case, if you’re posting something that you want to be featured, all you have to do is include it in that category. If you don’t want it to be featured over another post that was recently published in that category, don’t put it in the featured category.

Ability to scale to handle very large amounts of content

There are a lot of blogs out there that publish a huge amount of content. In these cases, standard blog themes are pretty inefficient. Posts that are not that old will quickly be pushed down the front page and out of the spotlight. Likewise, with posts that are extremely frequent, there is likely a good bit of variety in the types of content. A magazine-style theme would allow for featuring more on the front page and also for categorizing the content to separate it more effectively.

With a well-designed and well-executed magazine theme, you can support a very large amount of content. The scaling possibilities with standard blog themes is much more limited.

Avoid the traditional blog look

Many people really hate the traditional blog look that is seen pretty much everywhere. A magazine theme can make your blog look less like a blog. This will be most notable on the front page, as pages of individual post will be a bit more like the individual posts from a typical blog.

The Downsides to Magazine Themes:

Despite all of the benefits and reasons to use a magazine-style theme, they’re still not a good fit for every blog. Here is a look at some situations where they can be ineffective.

They can be awkward if you don’t publish a lot of content

Standard blogs themes will typically work better if you are not pumping out a lot of content. Visitors may come to your site and feel like nothing new has been added with a magazine theme, but with a standard theme they can’t help but see your most recent post. If the content you post is somewhat time-sensitive, a magazine theme can make your blog look abandoned if outdated content is still being shown on the front page.

Unfortunately there is no black and white number of when you should stick with a standard theme and when you should use a magazine theme. If you’re unsure, think about the content that’s currently on your blog that has been published in recent days and weeks. With a magazine theme, what categories of content would you prioritize? With your current content, what would wind up being on the front page? If you feel that some of it is outdated or would be awkward still being on the front page, stick with a standard theme.

Additional clicks may be neccesary to get to content

Ask 100 blog readers if they prefer full posts or excerpts on the front page and you’ll probably get a pretty evenly split response. With magazine themes there is no option to publish a full post on the front page. One of the downsides is that visitors will have to click on a story in order to read the full post. This isn’t the biggest issue, but still something to consider.

Additional work may be required

The layout and look of the front page of magazine themes is sometimes dependent upon the use of custom fields. For some people this can be enough of an annoying to stay away from these themes. Not all themes will require this, especially the premium themes.

Clutter

The front page of some blogs that use a magazine theme simply give too many options for many visitors. With too many options, visitors may leave rather than finding one that they like. While the presentation and layout can be a major plus for magazine themes, it can also have reverse effects in some situations.

How Can I Know if a Magazine Theme is Right for My Blog?

Now that I’ve listed the pros and cons, some of you may be find the question to be more complicated than ever. If that’s the case I’ll try to simplify things by listing a few factors that should be major considerations.

How much content do you publish?

If you publish tons of content on a regular basis, chances are a magazine theme would be a good fit. If you don’t, chances are you’ll be better off with a standard theme.

Does some of your content need to be featured over other content?

If you would like the ability to easily keep your best posts in a prominent position for a bit longer, you could benefit from a magazine theme.

What is typical in your niche?

You need to also consider your readers in the decision. Most likely they are also visiting and reading other blogs in your niche. What do they expect when they arrive at a blog? Will they be comfortable with a different layout? If you’re in a news-related niche for example, a magazine layout will be more comfortable to most of your visitors.

Which approach will give better navigation for your content?

One of the major differences for users of various styles of themes is navigation. As the blog owner it’s easy to overlook the fact that many of your visitors won’t know exactly where to find everything. What layout style will make it easiest for visitors to find the content that they want?

What’s Your Opinion?

How do you feel about magazine themes, and what factors would you consider if you were making the decision?

If you like getting design inspiration by looking at excellent blog designs, you’ll love our new gallery site Blog Design Heroes.

Navigation is obviously one of the most critical aspects of usability. Developing effective navigation is a challenge for most websites, but it’s especially an issue for blogs because of the content that is continually being added.

Think about the typical blog. A few new posts are probably added each week, but navigation is almost never changed or updated, except by using internal links within the posts themselves. Finding posts is always possible by browsing through the archives, checking through some categories, or by doing a search, but the more content that is added, the harder it is to navigate.

Some blogs that cover news and other time-sensitive info may have a high percentage of posts that are of very little value down the road, but the majority of blogs have a wealth of useful information in the archives that is not being maximized. Finding ways to make content easily accessible with logical navigation can be difficult to achieve without a cluttered blog.

Challenges and Issues Associated with Navigation

Ability to Find Old Content

I’ve spent the last year building up a blog that contains almost 300 posts (and I know many others have done the same or more), but my primary concern each week is finding a way to create new content to be posted that will help the blog continue to grow and move forward. Of course this should be a priority, but it’s not that often that I consider how I can make it easier for visitors to find old posts that they’ll appreciate.

Between the new subscribers that have come in the past few months and the growing number of search engine visitors, a very high percentage of visitors have never seen the older posts, and I think this is pretty common for most blogs. With that in mind, making the older content findable is very important. However, it’s always a challenge for bloggers and blog designers to know what content visitors will be looking for and how to make the navigation more effective in this way.

If you want to improve navigation to your archives should you include a popular posts section? Should you use a related posts plugin? Should you link to archive pages by month? By author? By category?

Personally, I like the idea of using a manually created list of popular posts in the sidebar, as I have done on this blog. This allows the blogger to highlight older content by their choice, rather than letting a plugin decide which posts are popular. Plus, it can be updated and changed from time-to-time to feature different posts.

In my opinion, one of the biggest keys to improving the ease of access to older posts is by using internal links within the body of posts. Before you publish a post take a minute to read through it specifically looking for opportunities to link to other posts in your archives. Contextual links are great for usability because visitors who are reading a post will often be interested in related information that you’ve covered in the past, and the link is right there in front of them. Also, links within the body of a post will obviously be included in your feed, which means subscribers will have another opportunity to click through to your blog from their feed reader.

Categories Are Virtually Useless in Most Cases

Maybe I’m not like the typical blog visitor, but personally I very rarely click on links to specific categories in a blog’s sidebar. (Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design has a recent article, Why Tags Are Better Than Categories.) When I was re-designing this blog theme I considered removing the category links from the sidebar altogether, which I may still do at some point.

Last week when writing about blog sidebars I gave the example of Freelance Switch not using a list of categories in their sidebar, and instead linking to an archives page. For now I’ve attempted to make the category list on this blog more user-friendly by removing a few specific categories from the list that either have very few posts or aren’t that relevant to most visitors. Hopefully the shorter list of categories will be a bit easier to digest.

When addressing the navigation of your blog, consider your category list. Do many visitors use the categories for finding content, or are they just taking up valuable space?

Popular Post Lists are Not Updated

I mentioned earlier that I like to control the popular posts listing manually. While this does provide the opportunity for the blogger to have more control over what posts are listed, it also tends to create lists that are rarely updated to include newer posts that should be there. By using a plugin to automate the list it will include these posts without any effort on your part.

While I don’t change my list all the time, I do add/remove links every now and then (I just added 40 Photoshop Tutorials for Lighting and Abstract Effects, which has done very well since being published last week). If popular post lists are never updated, they’re not doing much good for visitors.

Sidebars are Usually Ignored

I feel that sidebars are often an afterthought for bloggers and blog designers. They have potential to be more useful, but not if the necessary thought and effort isn’t put into their development.

Small Potato wrote a post on WPDesigner earlier this year, Static Sidebars Suck. In this post he gives some reasons why blogs should vary the sidebars according to the page or section of the site. Changing up the content of the sidebars can give visitors a different experience that could be more helpful and relevant to them.

If the primary purpose of a sidebar is to assist in navigation, and it’s being ignored, the overall navigational effectiveness of the blog is going to suffer. When working on improving the navigation of a blog, creating sidebars that get noticed by visitors and easily provide them with useful links should be a priority.

Related Posts Plugins are Nice, but Often Ineffective

Many blogs use plugins to include a list of related posts at the end of each post. This can certainly help improve the internal navigation of the blog (and the SEO as a result), but from my experience they are typically ignored by visitors.

I used one of these plugins at this blog several months ago until I did a WordPress upgrade and that particular plugin was not compatible with the new version of WordPress. I chose not to replace it with another similar plugin because the links were just taking up space and not being clicked. In some cases the related posts that we’re linked were certainly not ones that I would have chosen, and in other cases they were pretty accurate. In either situation, they were rarely used by visitors. Again, this is something that I tend to ignore on other blogs that I visit.

I’ve had more success with manually creating a list of 3 or 4 posts at the end that says, “If you enjoyed this article, please see…” I don’t do this on every post, only occasionally, so it seems to stand out a bit more to visitors. I tend to use these lists on posts that I expect to do well with social media. Since many visitors that arrive through social media have never been on the blog before, it would be a big plus to get them to click through to other posts.

Internal Links Within Posts are Critical

The most important aspect of blog navigation is including useful internal links within the body of your posts. They will generally get the highest click-through rates from visitors, and they’re also the most usable for visitors. If you’re reading a post and an internal link is used within the context of the post, you’ll usually have a very good idea of what you will find if you click on the link. Readers like to have an idea of where they are heading, and contextual links can accomplish this.

Adding internal links to your new posts isn’t that difficult, but adding links to older posts is almost never done. This is a huge issue for blog navigation, in my opinion, because there is usually far more content on a blog that would be relevant to visitors, but it simply isn’t linked in the right places. Imagine the average search engine visitor to your blog. They probably arrive at a post that was published several months ago because it provides the information that they were searching for. However, maybe you’ve published two or three posts since that time on the same topic that are more up-to-date and in more detail. Wouldn’t it be helpful for the visitor to see some links within the body of that post that point to these newer posts?

One solution to this issue is to go back through your archives and look for opportunities to add links to newer posts. This will obviously take some time depending on how many posts you have published. (This is on my to-do list for this blog). There is also the aLinks Plugin for WordPress users that looks like a viable option (I haven’t used this plugin myself, so I can’t testify to how well it works). This plugin will allow you to set up keywords and phrases that shouldn’t be linked to specific URLs. Any time that word or phrase appears in your blog posts aLinks will create the link to your page of choice.

Conclusion

While navigation is an important issue for usability, it’s also a never-ending challenge for bloggers that are constantly posting new content. In order to improve the navigation of your blog you’ll need to address several key issues and make decisions according to what will help visitors find what they are looking for, and what will allow you to maintain efficiency with managing the blog.

If you have other thoughts, issues, or challenges related to blog navigation, please leave a comment.

If you like getting design inspiration by looking at excellent blog designs, you’ll love our new gallery site Blog Design Heroes.

If you like getting design inspiration by looking at excellent blog designs, you’ll love our new gallery site Blog Design Heroes.

While sidebars aren’t the primary focal point of blogs, they still have an important role in usability and appearance. A well-designed sidebar can make it easier for visitors to find what they like, which will keep them at your site longer and improve your overall effectiveness. On the other hand, a poor sidebar can lead to lost and frustrated visitors.

Before the re-design of this site was started, the sidebar (or in this case sidebars) was a focal point of need. I felt that whatever direction the new design went, it needed to improve the usability of the site by making navigation easier and directing visitors to the appropriate parts of the site. The decision was made to use two sidebars in order to include everything that was needed without cluttering up the sidebar too much.

While I was thinking about what I wanted to do with the sidebar, I did a good deal of analyzing other blog designs that I like to see specifically what was effective about their sidebars. In this post I’d like to take a look at several examples and highlight some key points.

What is the Purpose of a Sidebar?

When you’re designing a blog , why do you use a sidebar? In some cases sidebars are probably used because it’s just the thing to do. All blogs have sidebars, right? But without knowing the purpose it’s unlikely that you’ll have an effective sidebar. In my opinion, the primary purpose of a sidebar is to aid in navigation by making it quick and easy for visitors to get to many different places on your site without searching everywhere.

Additionally, I think an effective sidebar will give a new visitor a good idea of what your blog is about and what types of content they can find on the site. If a new visitors arrives through a search engine they’re probably looking at one specific post. They will obviously be able to see the content provided in that particular post, but that doesn’t tell them what else is available at the site. A sidebar (through category listings, popular posts, recent posts, etc.) can give them a better idea of the big picture of your blog.

What Should a Sidebar Accomplish?

Highlight the appropriate content

Many blogs, mine included, use the sidebar to display the best or most popular posts or pages. The sidebar provides you with an opportunity to show readers something other than just the post they are reading. What ever is most important to your blog should be highlighted. If your most important content is your popular posts, than a simple listing of those posts can do the trick (you can do this either manually or through the use of a plugin). If you’re selling a product, this is something that you’ll probably want to highlight on your sidebar. RSS subscriptions are a priority for most bloggers, so you’ll typically see links to RSS feeds at the top of sidebars.

Give an Overview

As I mentioned earlier, the sidebar can quickly give new visitors an idea of what your blog is all about and what topics/subjects are covered. Look at the sidebar as your opportunity to explain your blog. A few bloggers do this by actually having a paragraph or two to say what the blog is about, but what’s more common is to tell the story through the content that is highlighted. Judging by the content of your sidebar(s), can new visitors get an accurate idea of what your blog is really about?

Add to the Attractiveness

Some well-designed sidebars, like the ones we’ll look at in a minute, can go beyond just improving the usability of the blog by adding to the visual appearance. You don’t want the sidebar to take too much attention away from the primary content, but it can still me more than some simple text and links. In attempt to improve the look of the sidebar at this blog, images were used to accompany the links to popular posts. It’s still too early to tell if this has been effective in terms of getting clicks to those links, but that was probably the part of the design that drew the most comments from readers.

Allow for Scaling of the Blog

Because blogs are publishing new content so frequently, the sidebar needs to be able to adapt and scale with the blog. If you add several new posts per week and your sidebar hasn’t changed for six months, chances are that it’s not reaching maximum effectiveness.

Some sidebar elements, such as a list of recent posts, will update automatically, while other changes will need to be done manually. Don’t forget every now and then to evaluate your sidebar and see what needs to be added, changed, or removed.

Examples of Excellent Sidebars

The examples listed and broken down below are just a handful of excellent sidebars that you’ll find if you look around. The images that I’m using are obviously just a portion of the sidebars, so please click-through in order to see them in all their glory.

Freelance Switch

On of my favorite sidebars is from Freelance Switch. Their sidebar is one of the most attractive ones that I have seen. The color, typography and use of several small images create a sidebar that looks great while improving on the usability of the site. One thing you may notice that Freelance Switch does differently than most blogs, there is no category listing. Instead, they link to an archives page where visitors can browse through the categories if they like. Personally, I almost never use the category links on blogs, and I’ve considered removing them on this blog for that reason. At Freelance Switch the space in the sidebar is used for other purposes, such as an “Explore Freelance Switch” section that will take new visitors on a bit of a tour through the major topics of the blog.

Pearsonified

The sidebar used at Pearsonified primarily consists of links to specific posts in a few classifications, including Must Reads, Improve Your Blog, and Worth a Look. This navigational approach in the sidebar of highlighting popular or important posts is pretty common, but Chris gives his links a stylish, colorful look that you don’t see everywhere.

Pro Blog Design

Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design uses an attractive sidebar that features one of the nicer feed subscription areas that you’ll see. Right below that he has a spot that advertises his design services, which is a good use of the prime screen real estate in his sidebar.

David Airey

Graphic designer David Airey uses a very nice, clean blog layout with sidebar on each side. The sidebars are mostly lists with some CSS styling for appearance, which goes nicely with the overall look of his blog. At the top of the left sidebar, where most visitors will look first, he has a small picture of himself and links for “Hire David Airey” and “View David Airey’s Portfolio.” Since David’s blog serves in part to indirectly sell his services, this section of his sidebar is an excellent choice. It puts the most important parts of his site where visitors will see it, and the picture helps potential clients to feel like they know him a little better.

Copyblogger

Copyblogger also has a sidebar on each side. The top of the left sidebar, which starts very high on the page, includes an attract call for subscriptions, and then it links to some of the more important sections of the site. This list includes links to a few individual posts and links to pages that have been set up to funnel visitors to posts on particular topics (a nice use of WordPress pages).

The 9513

The 9513 is a country music blog with an excellent design overall. It uses two sidebars, however, most of the content is in the right sidebar. The part that I’d like to point out links to recent album reviews on the blog. Album cover images are used to link to 8 recent reviews. Very little screen space is taken up by this, but it adds to appearance of the sidebar and makes it easy for visitors to read the reviews that interest them.

What’s Your Approach with a Sidebar?

When you’re designing a blog theme, what do you hope to accomplish with a sidebar?

If you like getting design inspiration by looking at excellent blog designs, you’ll love our new gallery site Blog Design Heroes.

Blog designers consistently face the decision of showing full posts or excerpts on the front page. Personally, I prefer excerpts because they make it easy for the visitor to quickly scan the most recent posts and see what’s of interest to them. The downside of course is that they’ll have to click through to a post in order to read it in its entirety.

Displaying excerpts on the front page can also give the designer an opportunity to add some creativity to the design and to make it a bit more visually appealing. In this post I’d like to take a quick look at 5 blogs that are effectively using excerpts to create a functional and attractive front page.

Carsonified

The front page of Carsonified has a lot going on. It’s a great design, but the look obviously wouldn’t be possible without a well-executed use of post excerpts. On the left side of the screen you’ll see the most recent excerpts with a picture of the author and the comment count in a nice speech bubble. In order to really appreciate the use of the excerpts you need to evaluate the page as a whole and how the excerpts allow visitors to see which posts interest them, but they still allow plenty of space for other content.

Kineda

Kineda has a colorful, clean design that displays excerpts of 8 posts above the fold. The excerpts are very short (the posts are typically short also), but I don’t remember seeing other blogs that put that much content in sight at once. Each excerpt includes a picture, the date, and the number of comments. Since multiple posts are added on some days, this gives visitors a chance to see all the most recent content without missing anything. This approach gives the front page a nice look with a lot of visual appeal.

PSDTUTS

PSDTUTS and NETTUTS both use the same design with some minor changes, and both have an attractive front page that effectively uses excerpts to show off recent posts. Each excerpt has an image to the left, which is the finished product of the tutorial in most cases. The excerpts also include links to vote at four different social media sites. For a tutorial site that covers graphic design I think this layout is wonderful. As a reader of the site I frequently visit the site when I’m messing around in Photoshop. With the excerpts and the images I can scroll through the pages easily to find something that interests me.

Art Culture

Art Culture uses a bit of a magazine-style approach with its front page. The most recent post has a large excerpt with an image, and other recent posts have attractive excerpts with images, dates and a link to comment. Art Culture shows six of these smaller excerpts followed by a featured post and two larger excerpts.

La Privata Repubblica

The front page of La Privata Repubblica shows 8 excerpts with corresponding images. This keeps their front page fairly short and still presents a good bit of content and some images to increase the look of the page.

What’s Your Opinion?

How do you think the decision of full posts or excerpts affects the design of the front page? Are there other examples that you would like to point out?

If you like getting design inspiration by looking at excellent blog designs, you’ll love our new gallery site Blog Design Heroes.

Last week I published a post that posed the question, How important is design to a blog’s success? I am really pleased with the depth of the comments that have been entered on that post by readers and by some designers that I respect. If you didn’t read that post, my point was essentially that design does have an impact on a blog’s level of success, but not as much of an impact as other areas, such as the quality of content.

To be honest, I was a bit (pleasantly) surprised at the overall feeling of the readers who commented. The overwhelming feeling was that design does play a significant role in the life of a blog (although other views have been shared too). While I do feel that design should be a priority for bloggers, I sometimes wonder how much my opinion is biased because of my perspective as a designer.

A few different readers commented that high quality designs are common with A-list blogs like Freelance Switch, ProBlogger and others. Most readers expect a top blog to have a quality of design that equals the quality of content. With that in mind, is your blog design capable of helping you to get to the next level of blogging success?

It’s obviously common and critical for bloggers to focus on content and being able to create better and more unique posts that will help the blog to grow, but what about design? In my opinion, your blog should look like it belongs at the level you are aiming for, not at your current level. This doesn’t mean that your blog has to be fancy and have lots of bells and whistles, some very good blogs have a fairly simple, yet attractive and effective, design.

This also doesn’t mean that your blog has to feature the best design in your niche. However, an improved theme design can help new visitors to see your blog at the level that you want to reach. Granted, if the content doesn’t back it up, it really doesn’t make much of a difference in the long-term.

To be fair, this is an issue that needs to be addressed with this blog as well. When the current theme was developed there were about 100 subscribers. At that time, I think the design reflected where it was headed, but as I look at the blogs that are where I want to be, this theme is lacking. Within the next few months that should change.

What are Your Thoughts?

I’m very interested in again getting some of your thoughts on this issue. You’ve probably heard the expression “You should dress for the job you want, not the one you have.” Do you agree that this also applies for blogs?

If you like getting design inspiration by looking at excellent blog designs, you’ll love our new gallery site Blog Design Heroes.

Those of us that read and visit tons of blogs everyday have grown to expect certain designs and styles. In many cases blog design tends to be less attractive and less innovative than website design in general. Part of this obviously is because of the emphasis on content rather than appearance. There are certainly plenty of blogs that stand out as being beautifully designed, but these are the exception to the rule. Just how much of an impact does a blog’s design have on its ultimate level of success?

Frequent Changes

First of all, it’s important to remember that most blogs change themes more frequently than traditional websites experience re-designs. So a poorly-designed blog can quickly improve its look.

Part of the reason blogs tend to change themes fairly frequently is because of the availability of thousands of different themes (especially for WordPress), and most of them are free. I think another contributing factor is that blogs have more to gain from a fresh look than traditional websites do. When compared to most other types of sites, blogs experience much more repeat traffic. Many readers come back day after day, and as a result a blog can grow stale much quicker.

Because of the frequent theme changes, a blog that has a great design didn’t necessarily become successful because of the design. Many bloggers have built their blog using free themes of lower quality and then upgraded the look after the blog had already become successful.

What Contributes to a Blog’s Success?

A high-quality design will no doubt help a blog, but there are obviously other factors that play a significant role in a blog’s success. While design can help or hurt a blog, it certainly has far less impact on the long-term success of the blog than the quality of content. Blog readers like to see a nice design, but content is what really keeps them coming back.

Marketing is another important factor for blog success. Some bloggers spend a lot of time, effort, and money of promotional efforts, and some others create the content and wait for others to market it for them. Regardless of what marketing strategy a blogger chooses, gaining exposure and receiving, links, referrals, and buzz are important.

When looking at long-term blogging success, consistency is also crucial. Most bloggers don’t make it very far and those that do have been willing to work through the ups and downs, the disappointments and setbacks that are involved with blogging.

So, if Design isn’t that Important, What Role Does it Have?

If you look at the top blogs in any niche you’ll primarily see blogs with custom theme designs. The question then becomes “Is the blog successful because of the design, or is the custom theme a result of being successful?”

With so many blogs out there and so many themes, a good blog design will help the blog to stand out and be easily recognizable to visitors. This, in my opinion, is the most important benefit of a custom theme. As readers keep coming to your blog several times a week, they’re increasingly less likely to pay attention to your design. They’ll know what to expect after a few visits, and the content will have to keep them coming back. On the other hand, the blog’s design can have a huge impact on the first impression of new visitors. Part of branding a blog includes the image that its appearance creates in the minds of readers. These factors should not be ignored, because they mean that the blog’s design and appearance can have an impact on its level of success.

The blog design can also seriously help or hurt the level of success of the blog by how it emphasizes or de-emphasizes the content. Readability is key. In order for visitors to appreciate the content, the design should emphasize it and not distract visitors away from it.

What Are Your Thoughts?

How do you see the impact of design on a blog’s success?