Have you revisited your blog lately and saw an unexciting, lifeless site with old text-only content? It’s a common occurrence with blogs, business or personal, whose owners have neglected them and moved on to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If, for practical or sentimental reasons, you want to start again, here are X steps to giving your blog a makeover.

A blog that gets the attention of readers is one with an attractive design, a layout that’s easy on the eye, great unique content and spectacular images. Here are tips to achieve these features, revive your outdated blog and once again draw traffic to it.

Give your blog a design facelift.

Since you’re only renovating your blog, you can keep the existing template and colors. Or you can go radical and change the whole thing. WordPress has many themes to choose from, if you’re using it as your blogging platform. That said, remake your blog to get a clean and uncluttered look. Here are basic guidelines to follow:

• Maintain vertical alignment. Be consistent in the size of your images and keep paragraphs and sidebar contents in the same width so that they fit into their columns properly.
• Make use of white space to avoid overcrowding.
• Minimize animations and banner ads so your site will load faster.
• Make use of the newer features to make your blog look modern and contemporary. Most blogging platforms support them, so you don’t have to be an IT specialist to make the changes.
• Use snippets for your posts on your homepage.
• Have scrolling social buttons so readers can like or share your posts.
• Consider the type of font, size and spacing for better readability.
• Fix the navigation menu to the top of the browser window.
• Use infinite scrolling.
• Have a slider on your homepage for featuring your best posts.
• Shift to a responsive web design as more users go mobile. This may require getting the services of a web designer or IT firm.

Check out the blog of exponential-e.com as an example of a business blog that is keeping up with website and blogging trends.

Update your content.

Great content is unique, specific and gives valuable information. Those are givens. But even great content is boring if it’s all text or images are grainy and plain old black-and-white. Make your content interesting and eye-catching by using great images, entertaining videos and helpful infographics.

Strong images are clear and sharp. The intensity of the colors and lighting are right. They have a main focus and the capacity to elicit emotions from the viewer. Obviously, they must be relevant to the post. Image size should preferably be the same as the content area of your post. If you have a 680 pixel width for your content, use images of the same size, not larger. Surveys have shown that having a great image on top of a blog post draws traffic and increases the number of readers.

Great videos are devoid of unnecessary scenes and are short (preferably less than two minutes unless it’s a tutorial.) Incorporate music and humor. Upbeat music works better than slow and humor lifts up the spirits. As with images, the width of the video should not be bigger than the width of the content area. Check the embed code where the width and height is seen in the first line and adjust accordingly.

Infographics are wonderful ways to deliver data in visual format. The information is also better understood and retained, and colored charts and diagrams add to a post’s attraction.

Start with these two tips for reviving an outdated blog, then resume blogging regularly so your efforts don’t go to waste.

Originally posted on October 23, 2015 @ 1:06 am