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I like checking out other blogs for inspiration. Sometimes this brings new ideas that I can use on one of my own blogs, but I also see blogs that show you what not to do. I’m not going to point the finger at anyone, but there are some blogs that are just too horrible to visit. Here are a few things for you to think about when figuring out the layout of your blog (or any other website for that matter)

Readability
People come to your blog or website to read your content, so make sure they can read it. Some people like to use pretty background pictures that continue behind the text and make the content very hard to read. Use an even background color for your content and make sure your text has sufficient contrast to the background. Font size is another important factor to think about. Too big or too small makes text hard to read.

Video and audio
Video can be a great medium to communicate a message to your website visitors, but it shouldn’t start playing as soon as your page opens. Please let me decide if, and when, I want to press play. The same goes for audio, I don’t need to hear your favorite song playing when I visit your site.

Ads
Some people have more ads than content on their website. Ads should be subtly integrated into your website, if at all. All too often I see sites trying to sell their own product or service and show ads of their competitors. Do you want to sell your own stuff or make your visitors aware of the competition?

Plugins
There are a great number of useful plugins that you can add to your blog. Before adding them all, think about which ones would be useful to your visitors. I don’t care what the weather forecast at you place is. I’m also not likely to be interested in the current moon phase when reading a blog about cars. When adding widgets to your sidebar, try to use static ones. Flashy, animated gifs distract your visitors from the content.

If you don’t agree with the above advice, you are not alone. There’s a huge website with people just like you, it’s called MySpace.

Today I’m happy to publish a guest post by Aditya from Tech Ravings. Tech Ravings is a new blog, featuring great tips and advise for bloggers.

Images are a way to commute and impress. An image customized to your blogging needs is a resource. A dashing and sporting image like the one above can get attention of your readers and bring in some loyal readers to your blog.

Many bloggers search images on Google or other search engines and then pin it up on their post. Most of the times, these pictures are not relevant to your article and require some photoshoping. If you blog full-time and you are a master of photo-editing, you can create some really nice illustrations for your blog posts. But, if you blog in part-time and you do not have enough time or if you can not do photo- editing, you may be on the backgear.

Here comes the role of image and text generators. These are the online tools that will create wonderful illustrations and graphics for you without ever requiring you to know those photo-editing skills.

In this post, I have listed some of the best image and text generators out in the network that may be interesting to bloggers.
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