My typical experience is that in blogging substance generally wins out over style. No matter how pretty the blog, if the content isn’t worthwhile and the writing isn’t good, the visitors won’t come. At the same time, you could have the best content, but it will be tougher for people to find if your layout isn’t easy to navigate. Chris Garrett at Performancing (who has become one of my favorite reads very quickly) offers up: Make A Great First Impression In 30 Seconds Or Less.
It has some great points about titles, navigation, writing skimmable posts, and some general design guidelines that will keep visitors reading instead of clicking through.
I’d imagine many sports bloggers’ strengths probably don’t lie in CSS or HTML, and as a result there isn’t a lot of attention paid to design. If you’re not experienced with layout, you could easily get wrapped up in design and neglect your content. This probably helps explain the number of default templates in use. It is also a pretty compelling reason to join a network where the layout is done for you.
Personally, an area I need to work on the most is writing skimmable posts. This entails making good use of sub-headers, lists, and graphics. Too often I have long, long blocks of text. Maybe that can be my New Year’s blog resolution?
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Thanks for the link. I thought it was funny that the two typos grated on my nerves so. Guess I’d better make good use of the spell check on my own blog.
I’m a firm believer in writing skimmably, and I pride myself on my bullets. Whenever I see a dense, verbose chunk of prose on another blog, I think “who’s going to read that?” But invariably, someone has responded with “Great analysis!” in the comments, and I’m again left questioning my entire belief system.
Does being bombastic lend you credibility in a baseblog? Or was that post really so excellently fantastic that it transcended the presentation? Or did that person only say it was a great analysis to make themselves feel smarter after they tried and failed to decipher the impenetrable formatting?
Whatever. I’ll stick with the bullets. Mine look like little baseballs.