5 Tips for Designing Magazine Style Blog

While the use of print media might be declining, blogs are hotter than ever. One of the biggest trends in blogs right now is, ironically, giving them the aesthetic appeal of a magazine. Traditional media has its allure, after all. There are some great tips to help you get your block on this visually pleasing track.

Consider Your Design Carefully

You might notice that the lion’s share of blogs out there put zero thought into the design of the site. For the most part, this is an offense committed by beginners, but there are some experienced bloggers out there who should know better. Amateurish header and background images, cookie cutter themes supplied by blogging sites, and bad alignment scream beginner. These problems can cause someone to leave the blog before they manage to read even a full post. If you don’t know how to design a blog, learn. This will help you make your site look its best and bring in new readers who will keep reading your blog because it suddenly isn’t offensive to their eyes.

Re-evaluate the Content

People make fun of popular magazine behavior, such as printing the same beauty tips with slightly different wording, repetitive sex advice, or checklists for knowing whether your relationship is going anywhere every single month. Think about it, though – the magazines that do this end up with the highest readership because they constantly bring new readers in with these schemes, repetitive though they may be. Look at your last dozen blog posts and consider how many of them were new, groundbreaking concepts. More than likely, you can find articles saying similar or the very same things in other places on the internet. This doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be on your blog, though! Even if the same info could have been found somewhere else online, or perhaps even in your own past archived posts, it was something that your readers wanted to read. The important thing is writing this information to make it interesting no matter how many times they might have happened across it on the web before.

Make that RSS Button Visible

One of the ways magazines make their money is through subscriptions. Obviously, right? You pick up a magazine at the supermarket checkout and a dozen subscription cards flutter out. Magazine companies know that if you get a year subscription, you are more likely to end up a dedicated reader than if you just happen across an issue here and there at the store or news stand. So, they put handfuls of subscription cards in the magazines to keep that trouble-free commitment to getting one magazine a month on your mind. An RSS button is a lot like those little cards. If they aren’t there, no one is going to take the time to subscribe. Make your RSS button extremely visible. Many sites try to hide them, but these can be the life blood of your blog when it comes to readers. Place the RSS button on your blog in a prominent place, where people will see it as soon as your site loads.

Tidy Up Your Sidebar

Sidebars are a great, convenient way to pursue a site. However, when they are cluttered and messy or badly coded so that the content of the sidebar invades space outside of it, they run into annoying and ugly territory. Make sure that your sidebar or sidebars are neat and tidy, with links in a section, archived posts in a section, your bio in a section of its own, and so on. And for goodness sake, center those images. All of the widgets and buttons in your sidebar should be centered perfectly and be the right size for your sidebar’s width. If you can’t find a button small enough for a site that you want to link to, make your own.

Making Your Text Look Cleaner

First things first – come up with great text for your page’s title. It should grab attention and make people want to look further. Avoid using characters outside of the alphabet. There should be no tildes or asterisks in your title text, no matter how cute you think they are. As for the content of the blog posts themselves, justify the text. Justified text looks clean and squared off, just like the columns in a magazine. This makes them easier to read and keeps readers from getting a headache before they begin to love your content and come back for more.

So is your blog theme magazine style? Do share your blog’s layout and how you made it the best one?  If you know another tip to enhance the way of magazine style blog then don’t forget to mention about it.