Heels To Boot

The way you lay out your content is more important than you’d think. It allows you to highlight the important parts of your post, order it, and makes it much more attractive to the eye. A series of long paragraphs with no headings, lists with no bullet points, and so on are not only intimidating but downright off putting to visitors and potential customers. These are some simple tips to tidy up your content.

Headings

Headings are a good way to break your content up into pieces. For example, in this article, the different tips will be under individual headings. This allows readers to skim the article and pick up the gist of it, skip to the part they want, and it’s tidier and more organized.

Example heading structure:

Heading 2

Ideal for section titles, or subsections if you use H1 (many blogs use H1 for the site header, so avoid it if you’re not sure)

Heading 3

Heading 3 is good for subsections, for example, this post uses H2 for the title “Gear”, and then H3 for the subsection “cutting down costs”.

You can use other headings, such as H4 and H5, but unless they’ve been specifically defined they tend to be smaller than your text. For any headings smaller than that you could just use bolded text.

Lists

Lists are best used when you have a lot of pieces of content, say the ingredients for an apple pie, that don’t need a lot of explanation.

This post uses pullet points for the ingredients lists in the first section.

You should avoid using lists for content that has a lot of info attached and instead use sub sections or sub sub sections like this post does. You can title them with either a header or by bolding the first sentence.

There are two types of list:

Bullet Points

Bullet points are ideal for any list that isn’t in a specific order. Some examples are;

• Ingredient lists
• Gear or parts lists
• Exercises
• Acknowledgments (e.g. sponsors, donations)

Numbered lists

These are good for when your items need to be in order. Most commonly they’re used for instructions or rankings.  How to decide if you need a numbered list.

1. Ask yourself “does it matter what order the content is in?”
2. Can this order be served by an ordinary bulleted list?
3. If you answer yes to the first question, and no to the second, then you need a numbered list. Go make one.

You can also use sub lists. For example;

Bridget’s articles

• Recipes
  • Desserts, cakes, scones, etc
  • Vegetarian
  • Soups
• Marketing
  • Websites
  • Social networking
  • Design
• Causes
  • Animal rights
  • Human rights

Lists are meant for summarising and outlining. If you have a lot to get through in an article, you could try listing the sections first, and then making a section for each item later in the article and going into detail there.

Introduction paragraphs

At the start of your articles, unless they’re really short,  it’s a great idea to have an introduction paragraph. This gives viewers a run down on the post or article, and it also gives search engines a bunch of juicy keywords in the first few lines.

Your intro could include;

• What the article is about (essential)
• Why what the article talks about is useful/important/interesting (important)
• Who you, the author are (not essential)
• What qualifies you to write this article (helpful, especially if you’re not submitting to your own site or you don’t have much content up yet)

For bigger articles an introduction sentence or paragraph for each section can be a good idea.

Images

You shouldn’t go overboard with images, but they’re definitely a great way to add another dimension to your post, and they can be helpful in terms of giving instructions or examples.

Size

The ideal size for an image depends on it’s importance, how easy it is to see what it is of, the size of your site layout, and how much text is going to be grouped around it. A good rule of thumb is 150×150 pixels for small images (avatars, symbols etc), and a max of 300 wide for photos or other larger images – 250 is more ideal. You can always have the pictures enlarge on click.

This is the logo for the upcoming 60s musical “A slice of Saturday night”

This image doesn’t have much detail so it can be nice and small. There also isn’t a lot of text alongside it.

Now lets look at a bigger image;

This is a picture of me with Tom Ryder’s cat Pants (yes, that’s her name). She was purring at the time, whatever her expression looks like.

There’s a fair bit more detail in this than the Slice logo, but the photo doesn’t need to be huge to get the point across.

This photo is 250 pixels wide. It’s a wee bit taller though, and I don’t really have enough content to fit alongside it, so I either have to use up some space with my rambling, or else throw in some line breaks, maybe both. Sometimes line breaks don’t work properly on blogs, so have a play around and see what you can do. Hey, I wrote enough stuff to fill the space. Sweet.

Alignment

Alignment is something a lot of new bloggers don’t know about. There’s usually an option when you add your image to align it to the left, right or center. This is important because if you don’t align your image it will be treated like a gigantic letter and look like this;

Words words WHOA KITTY!

Doesn’t look so great huh?

Left is a good standard (like I did earlier), though sometimes right aligning an image for some variety is a good idea. Center aligning an image means it gets a line of it’s own and it’ll sit in the center. This is good for when you have large images that for some reason need to be big. Photography is a good example of this.

Padding

Sometimes called vertical and horizontal space, padding is a good idea for all your images, particularly horizontal padding. This stops the text from being hard up against the edge of your image, like a buffer.

Without padding	With Padding
Words and suchlike go here. Notice how they’re squashed right up against the picture?	This version has a horizontal padding of 5 pixels. Much better.

Bold, Underline and Italics

These are all useful ways of highlight particular parts of a post that are important or that you want to look different without giving them a big heading of their own. They’re also useful for highlighting keywords or emphasizing particular words or sentences. Don’t go overboard with these though.

Because too much of a good thing is bad.

Like that.

It’s a good idea to pick a general sort of theme for these.  For example use italics to emphasise words, underline for keywords, and bold for mini headings or the first few words of paragraphs.

Tables

Tables are ideal for laying out content that requires columns. Not all blogs will make these automatically but once you know the code they’re not too difficult.

For example;

Type	Hourly rate
Standard	$50.00 inc GST
If you need it in a hurry	$75.00 inc GST
Non profit groups (by application)	$25.00 inc GST

Those are the rates for my business – Genkii Design Solutions.

Conclusions

A brief conclusion paragraph is a good idea too. Just briefly sum up what you’ve covered, and add a goodbye note.

And on that note, hopefully these tips will help you improve your blog posts.

Tags: better marketing, blog advice, blog layout, blogging for beginners, Business, business advice, how to blog, improve marketing, layout, Marketing, online marketing, usability, using headings, using lists, web layout

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Advice, Business, Design, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.