Bits and Pixels

A couple of weeks ago I clicked a link to a blog post that was announcing a contest with some absolutely fantastic prizes – and almost hit the back button! The reason? The content of the post was written in huge, red writing – even bigger than the title of the post! Not only was it ugly, but to read the whole post you had to scroll and scroll and keep on scrolling down the page.

It was reminiscent of those pages you find all over the net trying to sell you the secret to becoming a millionaire, and my first impression was that the blogger either didn’t know what he was doing, or that his blog was a scam. The only reason I stopped myself from immediately leaving the site was because I had read the list of prizes on the referring blog, and I had nothing to lose by entering the contest.

So I subscribed to his blog to enter the contest, and was pleasantly surprised by the posts I received in my inbox. So I went back to his site and looked around, and found it was full of useful info on the blog’s subject. This guy obviously knew his stuff, so why the horrible design? Couldn’t he see how bad it was?

A few days later I was checking the contest post again to find out how many entries everyone else had, but this time in Firefox – I  have no idea what made me use Firefox that day, as I greatly prefer Safari. And surprise surprise, the text was now black and the usual size! It turns out that there was an error in the code of his theme, just a </h2> after the post title instead of </h1>. The page was a mess in Safari, but the blogger didn’t know it because he hadn’t tested his blog in different browsers. I don’t know how long he had that layout, but he probably lost a whole lot of potential readers because of that one little mistake.

So the moral of the story is, always check your websites in as many browsers as you can – and if you can’t check them in the browsers like Internet Explorer or Safari because you don’t have the right operating system, then use an online service like BrowserShots, which will show you a screenshot of what your site looks like in the different browsers. Remember to check not only your homepage, but your other pages and individual posts as well.

Two days ago I wrote a post about earning money by video blogging. I enjoyed writing it, but when I was finished I looked at it and realized that if I was a reader browsing my blog, I wouldn’t even read it. Why? Because it was just a long page of uninterrupted text, and it didn’t encourage me to read it at all. I had of course divided it into paragraphs, but the spaces between them seemed hardly bigger than the usual spaces between lines.

So I thought, “What could I do to make this look better?” First I inserted subheadings to divide the text up a bit more so that it didn’t seem so long to read. It already looked better, but there was still a lot of text to read, and there was nothing that would immediately grab the readers’ attention and induce them to read the post. So I found an image relevant to the article and inserted it into my post. I was even lucky enough to find an image in a color that matched my layout!

With just these 2 modifications, the article already looked so much better! On the left is a screenshot of how the article looked before I divided it up, and on the right is a screenshot of how it looked afterwards. It would have looked even better if I had added another image further down.

Always make sure your posts look good enough that you would read them if they were on someone else’s blog