Spending hours on a blog post can be a waste of sweat and tears if visitors don’t stop for a read, which is why blog design is so important. Blogs should be functional, easy to navigate and easy on the eye. So you should think carefully about the elements you need to include and how your blog can reflect your personality.

Good blog design aids readability, and provides an elegant frame in which your carefully chosen words can shine.

Pulling readers into your content

Web visitors are a judgemental bunch, with the attention spans of gnats. So your blog design needs to tell them at a glance what you’re about and whether they might be interested in what you have to say.

Your blog’s header is the first element people will focus on when they arrive. So it should reflect your personality and appeal to your target audience if it’s going to pull them into your writing. Many aspects of a blog can be easily customised yourself. But if you really want your blog to pull in readers then paying for a professionally designed header can be a canny investment.

Your header can be used to display your logo, illustrate your topic or to feature a slogan telling people what you’re all about.

Other elements

You want to keep people engaged with and reading your blog for as long as possible. So deciding where to position elements that helps them navigate your content is worth some planning.

Elements could include an author bio, subscription options, links to recent posts and a search box so people can delve into your archives. The most important links should be kept above the fold, which means they should be visible to every visitor without the need to scroll down the screen.

Links to your Twitter and Facebook profiles are also popular, but you should be careful not to clutter up your blog’s sidebar. You don’t want visitors feeling overpowered by too much going on and clicking away in confusion. Sometimes simplicity is best.

Minimalist style or action packed collage?

In basic terms, minimalist blogs are carefully arranged to feature plenty of white space and evenly arranged images. Links and widgets are kept to a minimum so that visitors’ attention is focused on the blog’s actual content.

Alternately, you could take the approach adopted by many graphic designers and fill up the screen with graphics, logos and customised icons. There’s a fine line between creating an impression of organised chaos or a blog designed by a child left alone with the crayons. But when done well it’s certainly eye catching.

Top Ten Beautiful Blog Designs

Here’s a mixture of different blog styles, layouts and personalities. Whether minimalist, collage or retro, what these blogs all have in common is that they’re excellent examples of beautiful blog design:

That INDIE Dude

Loodo.com.br

Pays Sud Gatine

L’effet Créa

Objectified

Surfstation.com

No MILK Today

Meagan Fisher

Lynnterpretation

The Bond Makeover

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

You hear a lot of buzzwords and phrases in our fast paced marketing world. But one that’s continuing to gather pace and fans as it rolls into boardrooms is that of ‘conversational marketing’.

Everyday we form relationships through the things we say and the way we respond to those said by others. With it so important in the real world, it’s unsurprising that marketers are eager to adopt adopt a conversational approach to engaging with consumers.

The idea of marketing being a ‘conversation’ has been a hot topic for the last decade. But is there any real value in conversing with your customers? Or is it just evangelistic hype?

What is conversational marketing?

The idea of marketing becoming a conversation was first given legs by a set of theses in the ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ way back in 1999.

Its premise was that, in more innocent times, ‘markets’ were places where people met to talk about goods and services, as well as to buy them. But this dialogue has since been drowned out by advertising telling people what they should think and buy. The Cluetrain Manifesto’s big idea is that the arrival of the internet, and the ability for people to talk about goods and services online, means that companies can no longer dictate what their marketplace should think.

The conversations people have over the garden fence can now be broadcast to (theoretically) millions. So marketing now needs to engage with consumers in a two-way dialogue if it wants to remain relevant.

For the last decade The Cluetrain Manifesto’s big idea has been an almost cultish call to arms amongst legions of bloggers and internet marketers in heralding the internet as a new dawn in communication and the death knell for traditional advertising.

The Cluetrain now has fresh legs in the form of social media gurus, preaching on the influence wielded by people on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Now every company needs a community manager, or risks drowning in a flood of unchallenged negative commentary.

Taking a step back

Getting excited about the potential that social media offers for engaging with customers and boosting your profile is one thing. But thinking its created a revolution in how companies should communicate, and that all the old methods are now dead, is perhaps a step too far.

Dell is often held up as conversational marketing’s poster child. They’ve been very active in harnessing every tool to respond to criticism, engage with customers and to use feedback to implement improvements.

However, as an interesting debate between Dell and a critic in the comments of this E-Consultancy article highlight, conversational marketing is just another channel in the marketing mix. It’s not a replacement for methods that continue to be effective when used well.

Another channel, rather than a revolution

It’s certainly worth creating a Google alert for your brand, so you can listen out and respond to criticism in any far flung corner of the web. But you shouldn’t feel that you need to rush out and start creating fan pages on every social media site just to show that you ‘get it’.

The key, as always, is relevancy and value. So there’s no point creating Facebook groups and a Twitter campaign unless it’s something your customers will want to engage with.

Instead, your marketing should focus on delivering content that’s of value and relevant to your customers’ needs and interests. Email, for example, is still highly effective, and with modern database management one-to-one campaigns can be targeted to match individual preferences.

So, whilst it’s worth keeping an ear open and responding to what is being said about your brand, don’t think that conversational marketing is now the only way brands are built or that the old methods of marketing are now dead.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

A mistake many companies make is to use their marketing as an opportunity to pat themselves on the back and praise their achievements. But nobody likes braggers, boasters and conversation hogs. People like those who take an interest in others, show empathy and offer solutions to problems.

So your marketing should be focused on being likeable because, as every salesman knows, people prefer to buy from those they like.

Being expressive helps you be more likeable

Internet psychologist Graham Jones this week blogged about a study on how people formed impressions of others based on their Facebook profiles. The study concluded that a person’s likeability was gauged by how well they expressed themselves through their words and photos. Those who came across as genuine, personable and open were preferred to those who were guarded about what they revealed.

The marketing lesson from this is that to be more likeable online you need to be authentic, real and transparent, and present a human face to your organisation. A photo of your head office and a blurb praising your sales figures won’t do. People buy from people, not concrete buildings.

How to be likeable

In his popular book ‘The Likeability Factor’ former Yahoo! customer insight executive Tim Sanders defines likeability as a combination of friendliness, relevance, empathy and realness. These characteristics are all as applicable to success in marketing as they are to general life:

Friendliness – what tone of your voice does your marketing use? Is it approachable, upbeat and engaging? Or has it fallen in the trap of using long words and clichés to try and sound impressive?

Relevance – people respond to marketing that’s about their problems, concerns and desires. Your editorial content should be about the shared passions with your customers and focused on their preferences and interests. It shouldn’t be about on yours.

Empathy – people buy products and services to help solve a problem or to improve their lives. So your marketing should show understanding and sympathy for your customer’s predicament and offer solutions.

Realness – authenticity helps you appear trustworthy. Employing fakery, exaggeration and manipulated figures will backfire. Customers will ignore your calls and delete you from their address book when they can’t believe anything you have to say.

The nature of modern marketing is that of an ongoing conversation with your customers. And being friendly, interested in others, empathetic and real are all characteristics expressed through conversation.

So you should approach your marketing in the same manner as how you’d approach a one-to-one chat with your customers. Because being likeable is often regarded as vital to success in life and this is equally true of your marketing.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Oh, poor old Gordon Brown. He tries to experiment with a new tool for engaging with voters and it gets attention for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps someone should have told him that YouTube isn’t just another platform for pushing your message (and not to rely on cue cards to be reminded when to smile).

In Gordon’s defence, he simply made the same mistake many brands are guilty of: using new tools, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, for shallow self promotion, rather than offering people content they actually want.

Authenticity is the key to social media marketing

Whilst most of the criticism has focused on Gordon’s awkward impression of a Cheshire cat, the underlying problem with his foray into YouTube is that the video offered nothing of real value to viewers, and he made the marketing sin of not understanding his audience. In the world of social media, authenticity is the key.

Instead of trying to genuinely engage with voters’ concerns, Gordon used YouTube as a virtual soapbox to try and boost his popularity with empty gestures. Even the comments were turned off, which is another social media faux pas.

How Gordon should have used YouTube

When used properly, YouTube can be an effective marketing tool. By providing useful videos that answer people’s questions, offer industry insight or show how your product solves a problem, you can build an affinity with your brand.

Or if you’re feeling brave, you could try creating branded entertainment in which your product is the star. Blendtec’s ‘Will it Blend’ channel is YouTube’s poster child of how this can be done.

So the key thing to remember is that you shouldn’t use YouTube to simply push your message. Creating TV style commercials in which you vainly praise your company isn’t how you’ll win friends and influence people in the world of social media.

Publish and promote

Once you’ve created your ‘How To’ clip or video offering industry insight, make sure you don’t just upload it, sit back and hope for exposure to grow on its own. With 150,000 videos uploaded everyday, it’s going to have a lot of competition.

Integrate your YouTube campaign with the rest of your marketing. Add a link in your email signatures, paste the video onto your home page and add it to your email marketing campaigns. If your video is interesting enough then it might even spread virally through the power of Twitter and other online networks.

So remember, when marketing on YouTube your video must offer content that’s of value to viewers for it to be effective. People like to do business with those they’ve got to know and trust, so be authentic and don’t use YouTube simply to push your message.

Shame nobody told that to Gordon.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

In their 80s heyday TVs ad men ruled the break as their domain, and would marvel audiences with their creative brilliance and 30 second blockbusters. Budgets were generous, and top agency creatives were treated with the reverence of a Hollywood director (which one or two even became).

But times have changed. Now rarely a week passes without whispers of channels merging or collapsing because of the failure of the ad break to keep them alive.

If TV is a sinking ship then advertisers are now abandoning it in droves to chase after the audiences that left long ago.

People now prefer to spend their evenings on the web, where they can control what content they want to receive, which is the barrier every advertiser now faces in remaining relevant in today’s marketing mix.

Giving people what they want

In a recent post, marketing Einstein, Seth Godin commented on the challenges and opportunities advertisers face if they want to be successful online.

Without TV programmes to be paid for or limited slots to fill, the cost of running commercials on the web is low. This means companies who previously didn’t have the budget to compete with the big boys now can. Now anybody with a camera can start their own ad campaign.

Whilst Seth hails this as a great opportunity, it’s going to be difficult to create commercials people will watch when they have the attention spans of goldfish.

As with all modern marketing, the answer lies in being able to offer content people want to consume in exchange for their time.

More than likely, this will come in the form of entertainment, as shown by the popularity of the ‘Will it Blend’ commercials, featuring a sales message amongst the flying debris of iPhones and golf balls.

What about Susan Boyle?

Working out how to make commercials people will watch on the web is the puzzle facing every advertiser. And some are already missing out on millions whilst trying to figure it out.

You’d have thought ITV’s execs would have been rubbing their hands with glee over the Susan Boyle phenomena. But unfortunately they’ve been slow to take advantage of the 100+ million views of her YouTube clip, leaving them penniless.

It’s estimated that a brief ad slot before her clip could have netted £1.5 million revenue for the beleaguered channel.

So, advertisers can learn two things from Susan Boyle:

1. It’s often what the product does that people are interested in, rather than the presentation
2. If they can offer people content they want to consume then they might have a chance of delivering their commercials along with it

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.