Is Your Blog Design Holding You Back?

In a guest post on ProBlogger, Wendy Piersall from eMoms at Home wrote Is Your Blog Template Holding You Back?

In the first few months of blogging, there was SO much to learn. I figured that SEO was one of those battles I would tackle once I was “more established”. But after 9 months or so, I hired a professional designer to develop a custom template for my blog. Quite literally the next day, my search engine traffic doubled. Soon I went from 800 referrals a month to nearly 2400 monthly referrals – just from Google alone.

I realized rather quickly that I had been terribly short sighted on the importance of SEO for a blog.

Wendy goes on to interview Chris Pearson of Pearsonified and Sarah Lewis of Blogging Expertise, her web designer, about this incredible boost to her blogs performance just by changing the blog design.

If you are debating over the decision to hire a professional web designer or web consultant, read this article.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

7 Comments

Edrei

Posted June 15, 2007 at 6:05 am | Permalink

I’m noticing that too though. Ever since I designed my new blog design to suit what I’ve researched about blogs and my readers, my referrals have almost doubled in number. I wonder though what I can do to further help that, or have I done all that I can. It’s hard to get someone to help me out on this, most of the time it’s a trial and error job for me.

Wendy Piersall

Posted June 15, 2007 at 2:30 pm | Permalink

HUGS to you. Thanks for the mention! You’re the best blogging lady in the whole wide world. 😉

starleads

Posted June 21, 2007 at 7:05 am | Permalink

That explains the importance of designs for itself. A good design gets 50% of teh job done.

Phil Gerbyshak

Posted June 23, 2007 at 8:45 am | Permalink

Yep, it sure is. I’m working on that though. Thanks for the reminder Lorelle. 🙂

pelf

Posted June 25, 2007 at 4:28 am | Permalink

Hmm.. I guess that’s why web designers and consultants are so expensive in the first place..? Why, they help you triple whatever you wanted to achieve in one month! LOL.

kim

Posted January 30, 2008 at 11:35 am | Permalink

I just found this awesome blog and post. I am a website and blog designer and I couldn’t agree more. If people decide to design the blog themselves, I always recommend that they take time to look at the big picture before deciding to design any kind of look and feel; target audience, strategic goals, planning, writing for web, functionality, usability, accessibility, lead management, etc. A good design can only come about once these items have been considered in the planning and discovery phases of your project.

If they don’t like the idea of strategy and planning part, they should hire an experienced web designer instead. Yes, these people cost money. And so they should. They have years of real-world experience that a stay-at-home mom can never match. A web designer should be charging anywhere from $40-$80 an hour for freelance. If they aren’t, they probably don’t have the right experience and are trying to undercut the real designers.

Here’s my advice for choosing a designer. Evaluate their real-world experience, references, portfolio and style. It also helps if they can produce successful case studies of their past work to show conversion rates and ROI. I wouldn’t recommend hiring a web designer who hasn’t designed a blog before and/or doesn’t blog him/herself. In my experience, designing a blog and designing a traditional website are two different animals. Remember, it’s a matter of tools vs. talent. Anyone can buy Photoshop and Dreamweaver, but not everyone has the true talent to get you the ROI and traffic you require.

buster

Posted March 18, 2008 at 7:57 pm | Permalink

Well, its clear – nice design attract people