Even people who have no idea about usability feel the need to write articles about it to tell other people what they themselves should be doing. Usability has become a hot topic and everyone wants a piece of it by writing their own list of guidelines. Most of which end up just repeating what the other guy said. Yet even with the endless amount of articles on usability, there are still a lot of web designs that overlook easy ways to improve the usability of their design.

While there are many worthwhile guidelines to follow about usability, it really boils down to only two rule of thumbs. Those two are to make it easy to read and make it easy to find stuff. No matter what you do with your design, as long as you follow those two rule of thumbs then your design will be usable. Don’t stop there though and be satisfied. Take it to the next step and make it as aesthetic as possible and make it better all while still making sure your design follows the two guidelines.

Introduction

A big problem with blogs these days is that a lot of them look pretty much like each other so it is hard to tell them apart and worst, it makes them easy to forget. While the quality of your content will have a large effect on whether or not your material was worth remembering, the blog design will either make or break the user’s experience when they are reading your content.

In a previous article in the blog design 101 series, the importance of the peak-end rule was established. The peak-end rule being how a person codes their experience in a memory by taking the most intense feeling during that experience and combining it with the experience felt at the end. In this article, I will take it a step further and show you how to use the peak-end rule to your advantage.

The main reason for this post is because I created a landing page that organizes all the articles I have written for the “Creating a Blog Design from Scratch” Series outside of the blog’s software. I choose to do this, because I don’t believe a page or post listing all the articles would be as effective as creating a custom page. I think it came out really nice and makes it easy to access all the articles for the series on one page to refer to.

Other than that, I have made changes to the sidebar for the seventh time. The previous one was clean, but slightly lackluster. I pretty much just added some color and made a new RSS button. I also added my twitter and stumbleupon profiles to the sidebar for easier access. People were finding my profile by searching for it so this will make it easier. Go ahead and add me.

Note: I put follow on in the comments because I like to be nice, but please do not abuse it and try to use keywords as your name. If you do not have a name, I will give you one.

Introduction

When designing blogs I noticed there are a few different design elements that I have to take into account every time. I have broken these different design elements into nine different parts. The more attention you give to each part, the better your overall blog design will be.

1. Header
2. Content Area
3. Primary Navigation
4. Secondary Navigation
5. Headlines
6. Comments
7. Post’s Footer
8. Footer
9. Advertisements

Sometimes I find myself staring at a blog design for long periods of time, but I still can’t figure out how to make it better. This use to frustrate me to no end, because I believe that a design is never finished and you can always make it better.

Now it doesn’t really bother me anymore. My new problem is I can’t stop thinking about how I can make a design better even though I just made changes to it a little while before. What I did was I applied a technique I picked up a while ago, but never thought of using it in web design. The technique is very simple in itself, but what it does is it takes the problem and changes how you look at it. Just this simple change can make ideas on how you can improve your blog design pour out of your head.