Theme choice is Important for your Blog
After Reading A first impression is a lasting impression, I have thought much about blog Branding and what kind of Affect it can have on Blog Readership and relationships with other Bloggers. As most will judge you on the landing page of your blog or your blog theme layout .NICHOLAS CARDOT has done an excellent job on not only Branding his Blog with a nice theme but if you are a subscriber to his blog, You will also notice that he uses very easy to read email templates for his blog posts when they are so pleasing on the eye that they make you want to go to his blog and just read the content there also.
Visual Impact is Important
Often people will say that your content is the most important thing but the Visual Impact of your blog is what many visitors judge it on, Having good content will not be enough if the Visitor cannot easily Navigate your site they will Quickly Leave if there is something causing the Page to Load Slowly or flash in the Sidebar causes their browser to Crash.This is one of the reasons I use Categories in my blog header as the Visitor will possibly see one of the Categories that they may have interest in and make at least a second page view.
Speeding up your Blog
One of the Reasons I moved to a self hosted WordPress blog was because of page loading speed, When you are hosting on a free blogging service there are many things that cause your blog to load slowly also having access to the root of your domain name has many Advantages .Finding a good web hosting service is important if you are anyway interested in making your blog load fast I recommend Hostgator for reliable and Quality Hosting just use this coupon code “yournewhost” to get a $9.94 Discount off the hosting package price.Compressing your CSS and Enabling GZip Compression are some other things you can do to keep your blog loading fast.Another option is to use CSS Sprites there is a WordPress Plugin to Enable CSS Sprites easily.
Landing Pages for Social Networking Traffic
Another Trick to make a Better Impact on first time Visitors to your blog is to change where they enter your website. Sometimes people send referral traffic to an about page or another example if you have blog posts about twitter or Facebook then instead of linking to your homepage on your profile just link to these Articles as they would be of more interest to the visitor from the social networking sites. The same can be done with blog comments when linking a related post in the url field of the comment form will have a better impact on your blogs first time visitors this is also good for seo as you are doing deep linking.
The Author Name and Gravatar
There is nothing worse than reading a blog where the Author has not bothered to create a pen name when I see a blog that has Admin as the Author I automatically think Autoblog or Splog.This is also a problem with discussion and commenting on blogs as the reader will not want to say great post Admin use your real name or a pen name and get a Gravatar even if you do not enable them on your blog.
