The Best Blog Layout

By Bruce · Monday, July 19th, 2010

After my last workshop, I’ve been asked many times, “what is the best blog layout?” Originally, I told them that it depends on their mindset and what goals they have in mind. But the more I thought about it, I narrowed the most common items a blog should have to make the best layout.

First, the most effective basic design consists of a header at the top, blog post area on the left, one sidebar to the right and footer at the bottom. It used to be 3 or 4 column blogs with the post area in the middle, and a very “thick” header was the rage only several years ago. And the more contrasting colors the better. That was the past, and looking back, it was horrendous! 3 or 4 columns made the blog too “bulky” where there was too much going on design wise.

Sure, this “bloated” format was the most used format not to long ago. But smart bloggers were testing different formats out and combining some “intelligence” information from Google in the form of the heat map and found that the two column with thinner header and footer was the most effective blog layout there. Google’s heat map had something to do with studying how website visitors look at a web page….where their eyes focus on the page.

For now, you will see this simple website layout used by the most famous bloggers. Of course, we are going to exclude the big corporate blog sites that have a “magazine” style. These sites have up to 5 columns and many images and text buttons to go in so many different directions. Some examples of these sites are www.businessweek.com or www.cnn.com or the Wall Street Journal’s site, www.wsj.com.

If you are just starting out, make a 2 column blog layout and you are on your way to designing the perfect blog.