Unclutter your blog

Today we'll take it slower and relax, kick in with a cool ice tea and cleaning a bit our blog. Yup that's right, today we'll look into few ways of helping your blog look cleaner. Who thought relaxing and cleaning could ever be in the same sentence?!?! anyway..

1st. first thing that need to be cleaned up is the top of your blog's page.. that is the first thing your readers see. You can start up by hiding the navigation bar. It works wonders!

2nd. and the most important thing in the upper part of your blog is your blog banner. So when you're creating your banner, make sure it's coordinated with your blog first, but also know when too much is too much. Pick only one style(scrapbook-y look, picture, text or vectors look), and never mix and match as your result might be disastrous! Also Java looks more professional, I'm with you, but choosing that will make your site load slower..unless you have a host that allows you that luxury. But we're not talking Ferrari and Jaguar now, we're here with Volvo and Ford.. so take your time, drink some tea and work with what you have:)


3rd. well after the blog banner, the thing that usually drives readers away is a cluttered sidebar. If it's full of a bunch of de-centered and random buttons, you need to get on that immediately. I already told you how to center/decenter your sidebar buttons and how to size up you sidebar buttons.. so that should be of help for now!

4th. making your information available fast for your readers but don't clutter the sidebars. You can do that by tags. Yup that's right. Arrange all the posts in categories by tagging each of them accordingly. When you're done, add an HTML gadget on your sidebar and submit all posts with that tag to it.. If you don't know how to do that, let me know in the comments section and I'll get to explain that in our next tutorial:)

5th. Remove widgets showing which country your visitors are from. The internet is wide and open these days, and it's no Carrie Underwood revelation anymore if you have a visitor from north pole(love the ice there:). Plus you can use your blog's stats tool that Blogger made available now, for marketing purposes!

Picture courtesy of Carrie Underwood

6th. Remove recent comments widget. This doesn't help neither you, nor your readers, and the only thing they do, is just clutter your space. Displaying half a sentence from a comment that is already displayed in the comments section doesn't make sense; it only wastes more of your precious blog space.

7th. Remove email subscription forms from the sidebars or homepage. There's many people confused by these forms, because they look pretty similar to a searching box. So a better way to keep that option open for your readers is to dedicate a special page just for that or if it didn't prove to help your blog much, simply remove them completely.

OK people these are the first tips to fight blog clutter with the mighty force sword:) Here's the latest unclutering your blog posts! Make sure you don't miss any of these as they will keep coming.. after all why just spring and winter cleaning??? why not summer cleaning too?!?!:) I say, hello!!