Clean up your blog!

I read a lot of blogs as a blogger. Typically to keep myself informed about whats going on. Any news, any new designs, any new plug-ins, any funny stories, videos? And, I must say that some of the blogs, actually a lot of the blogs, out there have really so much gizmos that it take me half a century to load even the smallest post into my browser. And I have a pretty powerful connection to the internet also:)

I mean, clean up your blogs! Get rid of all those gizmos that neither you or your READERS need. I have made a list of a few questions you should ask yourself when looking on your blog:

DESIGN AND CODING:

• Do I really need all that heavy graphics? Do the graphics on my site bring something useful to my readers? (Probably not, unless your blogging about graphics..)
• Do the links on my blog look like “links”? Is it obvious where you can click? (Hint: keep the color of the links the same through the entire site.)
• Is my blog optimized for the screen resolution of most my readers? (on my blog nearly half of the readers have a screen resolution of 1024×768px. That means that I can’t have a blog wider then 900-950px if I dont want some readers getting a horizontal scrollbar)
• Do the colors of my blog make the content easy to read? (black text on a white background is best.)
• Do I have all the most important content/links/information above the fold? (the fold is what the reader can see without scrolling down..)
• Does my html and css validate?
• Will most browsers display my blog the same way? (Internet Explorer is a typical problem here..)
• Are the navigation links on my blog placed where most readers would expect to find them? Is my blog easy to navigate around?

ADVERTISING:

• Are the ads on my blog placed without interfering with the readers wish to read the content of my blog?
• Do the ads on my blog blend in without looking to much like “ads”? (blended ads tends to do better then ads screeming “I’m here!!!”)
• Do I really need all those ads? Could I remove some of them making my blog easier to read and at the same time make my blog load faster?
• Are the ads on my blog relevant to my readers? (If the answer to this is “no”, get rid of them right away..)

GIZMOS:
Yeah, I mean all those widgets in your sidebar.

• Does BlogRush bring my readers useful information? (If the answer is “maybe” or “sometimes”, get rid of Blogrush right away..)
• Do I really need to display MyBlogLog, BUMPzee, and all those thousands of other “community”-gizmos? Do the small pics of my recent readers really matter to most of my readers? Isn’t it better to build a community on my blog then on the site of MyBlogLog? Could I do something special here? (On 99% of the blogs I read these community-gizmos just slow the loading time of the blog. They bring me nothing useful. So, you got a community? Good for you. I don’t care.)
• Do all the items in my sidebar bring my readers something useful, or is most of them just rubbish?

Yeah, clean up your blogs! Some of the blogs I read takes longer time to load then NY-Times.com! Mostly its because of way to many slow gizmos and stupid placed advertising. Remember the key factor here:

Make a blog that your readers can read easily and navigate around with ease. Keep the reader in mind on all times, and your blog will be much more popular. Most importantly, rememeber:

KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid!