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The Idiot’s Guide To Providing A Better Blog Reading Experience

Blog ReadingWhen you put together two bloggers who churn out equally good contents, chances are you will be attracted to one more than the other especially when the said blogger has taken pains to deliver a livelier blog reading experience. By the end of this article, you would be able to grasp what brings a better blog reading experience and you should aim to deliver that kind of experience to your readers.

Let us take the analogy of two salesmen making a powerpoint presentation of the same product. One salesman uses vivid images and friendly fonts to bring the message across. Another merely stuffs his powerpoint presentation with text, and sometimes with a poor choice of colours. The former will draw your attention and get you all excited but the latter would probably make you bored and shut all your attention to it. Get the picture of what I am trying to say? It is all about presentation.

 

Font

Not everyone reads with a magnifying glass and not everyone has difficult reading. Unless absolutely necessary, stay with the safe standard 12 point font. You wouldn’t want your readers to have to strain to read what you have written. Arial and Times New Roman are the standard fonts which are acceptable to most readers.

 

Colour

Delivering your contents in different colours are simply out of vogue. Stick to black coloured text or if you must, white on black background though I won’t advocate the use of the latter as it can be straining to the eyes to read white on black. I still cannot fathom why some people still find it fashionable to have one paragraph of text in red, followed by green and blue and yellow. It’s ugly!

 

Image

Use an appropriate image to liven up your post and the message you are trying to put across. These images break the mundane look of the blog and visually arrests your readers. Do ensure, however, that you look for the right image in the context of your contents. A good and relevant image makes a far greater and positive impact on your post than an irrelevant image. The images used on this blog were sourced from Flickr under the Creative Commons license. Should you then pack your post with images? No. The image serves as an appetiser and should not relegate your contents as a side-dish. Some bloggers make a mistake of having far too many images which tend to distract the reading of the contents. I for one, am distracted when there are more than 1 image in a blog post.

 

Paragraphing

Since blogging is not exactly the same as writing a thesis, do shorten your paragraphs if you can help it. Lengthy paragraphs takes a lot of effort from the readers to maintain their focus and interest in what you are trying to say. If you can reduce what you want to say by delivering it in three short and concise sentences compared to six, why not? Paragraphing is not the same as summarizing. The former is what you do to allow your readers to maintain focus on the salient points of the post. The latter is reducing the overall content into a shorter post (whether with or without proper paragraphing).

 

Emphasis

It is not harmful to give emphasis to what you want to say in your blog. Use of bold, italics or underlining of key words or points help to draw the readers attention to your main points. Nowadays, many blog readers have perfected the art of scanning a blog post for what’s really important before they decide whether to read the post in full. Use emphasis to grab their attention - but do it sparingly. Doing it too often dilutes their importance.

 

As you can see, we sometimes do not realise that little things can make a difference in providing our readers with a better blog reading experience. Have you been turned off from reading some blogs due to the mistakes in their presentation as described above?

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. 17 Mar 08 | About Image

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Intelligent Replies

  1. OldSailor | March 17th, 2008 at 12:39 pm

    In paragraphing, instead of writing long sentences using bullet points will help to understand easily.

  2. Adino | March 17th, 2008 at 5:04 pm

    Great post.

    Perhaps you should write a post about the Creative Commons license and what it means, if it gives us the right to use any image from Flickr, or the proper way to go about doing it, or NOT doing it.

    Regarding fonts, you might want to add Verdana to the list. Verdana font is specially designed for web page display, as opposed to Arial / Times Roman that are optimized for print.

  3. giddy tigress | March 22nd, 2008 at 12:05 am

    Love this post. Sounds almost like a crash course for those who want to start blogging. And those that follow your advice to the tee are bound to have visitors coming back again and again and again.

    Besides Verdana which Adino mentioned, i also like Tahoma, but that’s just my opinion.

  4. Richard Butler | March 23rd, 2008 at 12:33 pm

    Thank you for posting again a very informative article…Til your next post

  5. Tine | March 23rd, 2008 at 6:00 pm

    Thoroughly enjoyed this entry. Thought your points were spot on, especially about the use of fonts and colours. Just thought I’d add my pet peeves about blogging:
    1. i DoN’t UnDerStAnD wHy PeOpLe wOuLd WaNnA wRiTe LiKe ThIs (this was really tough to type, btw)
    2. Text/SMS-speak. Ugh.

    Oh, I love Verdana too ;)

  6. pablopabla | March 24th, 2008 at 12:53 pm

    OldSailor : The bullet points may be more relevant towards blogs like this or those that teach. It may not be that relevant for blogs which expresses thoughts like personal blogs. But I do understand and appreciate your point :D

    Adino : Hmm…I might write about the CC attributes when I get myself time to do so :D Thanks for the suggestion.

    Giddy Tigress : Personally, I like the Verdana and Tahoma looks. I use it a lot for my non-internet work :D

    Richard : Cheers!

    Tine : Wuahahah! I like that BIg sMaLl write up. I hate to say this but it feels more like what a young teen would write :P

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