Tech101 – Easy To Read Blogs

My brain is visually oriented and I can tell which bloggers consume information in the same way as me, because I find their posts very easy to read.

I have spent a lot of time in the past year writing blog posts and developing my blog site to make it as efficient as possible in delivering content.  Here is what I have learned during that time with the following techniques:

•  A very clean look and feel that is pleasing to the eye.  Avoid a rainbow of colours, it just distracts the reader from your material.  I went as far as using my own icons for VCDX, vExpert etc. to keep it simple and uniform.
• Use the “Insert Read More” tag to separate the main body of the post from the introduction.  It makes it much easier to glance over your homepage.  I hate scrolling forever.
• Avoid “War & Peace” – Fragment “a sea of words” into paragraphs, use italics, bold text, Headings and bullet points/numbering to break your message into short, sharp statements.  Brevity is your friend!
• “A picture is worth a thousand words” – Use diagrams to summarise the salient points of your article.
• For instructional posts, use screen-shots in conjunction with your written instructions, the two go hand-in-hand!
• Keep your posts under 800 words and break long articles into multiple posts.
• Spell check each article, there is nothing worse than bad English and punctuation errors, it detracts from what could be great content and gives your reader a headache.
• If you are a non-native English speaker, spend that extra effort in grammar and spell checking.  If you have a native English speaking friend, ask that person to review your posts before publishing.
• Use Categories to classify posts and use the Menu feature on your homepage to make those Categories easy to access.
• Provide links that readers can use to jump immediately to 3rd party content that is relevant to the post.
• Provide the “Search” widget in the Sidebar, so that your readers can find information quickly.
• Provide the “Archive” widget in the Sidebar, so that your readers can jump to archived content easily.

Additional References

• Tech101 – Successful Blogging
• Tech101 – Ads with Hosted WordPress