UX Tips & Tricks For Blogs
In today’s online world, a positive user experience is everything. When someone visits your website blog, it should be easy and straightforward to find everything they’re looking for and navigate your posts with ease.
Easier said than done, right?
At Blue Whale Media, our website designers and content writing team are frequently on the lookout for ways to improve blog layouts. This isn’t just for our own website; we aim to be creative when designing blog layouts for our customer’s websites. Here are our tips and tricks for blog designs to enhance the user experience.
Why blog layouts matter for user experience
If your users love it, so will the search engines and google. We’ve all been there, that moment when you’re trying to read an article on your phone. Ten seconds after staring at a white screen and a loading bar, you click the back button to go back to Google search results. Loading time is an important metric that you need to keep your eye on when designing your blog page’s excellent user experience. The truth is, Google knows a lot more than you think, Google has millions of other options to present if users are having a hard time visiting your page.
Readability
At Blue Whale Media, we’ve designed many websites and written a range of blogs for our clients. One of the biggest things we see time and time again in our industry is a lack of focus on readability within a blog layout.
- Typeface: When it comes to choosing your heading and paragraph fonts, be sure to choose wisely. Your typeface has the potential to make or break your user experience.
- Font sizing: Where are the majority of your readers coming from? Are they on desktop, mobile, or tablet? Take this into consideration when choosing your heading and paragraph font sizes.
- Line heights: When it comes to line heights, the golden rule is 140% of the font size. Of course, there are exceptions, but keeping this in mind during the design of your blog will help to ensure optimal readability of your website content.
- Margins: Give your blog’s text room to breathe with white space. Margins and column layout in your blog help with both reading speed and comprehension. Is the blog easy to skim or overwhelming with a wall of text?
- Paragraph, sentence lengths, and bulleted lists: We’ve all been intimidated by a wall of lengthy sentences in a blog post. Our rule of thumb is that you should use no more than four sentences for each paragraph; of course, there are exceptions, but following this rule of thumb will create a much better user experience for readers.
Final Thoughts
The user experience is at the core of everything you do as a writer or designer. It decides how well your website performs and ultimately how profitable your business can be. Providing a positive user experience involves examining multiple aspects of your web design to ensure everything works together smoothly.
If you’re looking to design a new blog but don’t know where to start, why not get in touch with Blue Whale Media? We’d love to help.
