10 Steps to an Uncluttered Blog
Aug 20th, 2007 by Anthony
Is your blog a mess! Well you may have a case of blog clutter. Lucky im here to provide a quick remedy.
Do your readers really need all those widgets, buttons, feed tools, links, etc etc. Blog clutter is all the stuff found on a blog that your readers don’t really need or want.
By removing some of this clutter you can drastically improve the quality and readability of your blog. So here are my ten steps to an uncluttered blog:
1) Remove Blog Directory Buttons - Or at least put them some place other than the front page. These buttons just take up valuable space and make any neat blog look messy. Why not just create an entire page for them away from your valuable sidebar.
2) Trim Down Your Categories - I know, I have a farily big category list (it was bigger but I have slowly been deleting categories). Lots categories will just confuse readers so try and keep them general. You don’t need a new cateogry for every new post!
3) Remove Recent Comments Widget - What value does the first few words of a comment provide your visitors. This plugin just takes up space and doesn’t provide any valuable content.
4) Reduce Individual Feed Buttons - Once again im guilty! These buttons really don’t do much and according to my heatmap tracking they aren’t clicked very often. Instead, im going to opt for a universal feed button instead of the Google, Netvibes combo etc.
5) Make Your Advertising More Pretty! - Ads placed hear there any everywhere on a blog will not only clutter your blog but probably also cut down on the profits you could be making. Opt for a simple advertising solution like 125×125 banners and only show a few at any one time.
6) Remove In Text Ads - Heres a point that people will disagree with. Remove all those in text ads (the links with the double lines). These are just plain annoying and based around a concept of tricking your readers!
7) Create an Archives Page - Why list your archives in your sidebar when you can dedicate an entire page to it. This also goes for the Calender widget.
8 ) Remove Counter Widgets - The only person who really cares about how many hits your getting is you! (and maybe advertisers). If you need to paste a widget into your blog to use the stats program - find another one!
9) Remove the “meta” Widget - The meta widget displays a link to the admin and also your feeds. Simply replace this with a single feed button. Im sure you can remember your admin URL. hint: wp-admin
10) Shorten Your Blogroll - Blogrolls that span the entire page are useless. How are your readers meant to find a link in that! If you have lots of links then make a separate page for links.
So there are 10 simple steps to removing a lot of the clutter. Of course you can go a lot further, but thats for another post.
Something I’d recommend is, if you have a lot of categories, or have a long blogroll, you can always use a bit of CSS to make your list scroll. You just have to put the blogroll in behind a div tag, with a style property of overflow:auto; height:###px. That way you can have a “best of both worlds” situation - you sill have your links, and you save some space.
Sephyroth
http://www.sephyroth.net
Great post! I too think it is very importantg that your readers not get lost in the clutter of tags, tools, and such. However, I think that having a recent comments section that displays the name of the commentor gives your readers a free temporary link, to thank them for commenting. Just a thought.
Good advice, even though your own blog is a tad cluttered. Better than most, however. I´ve long believed that most blogs are an utter mess, visually. It does not encourage readership.