If you are running a professional blog, then you don’t need to have a great design for your blog with sliders, jump navigation, galleries and stuffs like that. These decorations are cool when you are selling products. But for a blog, it’s all about reading. I mean it’s a no-brainer to understand that. A journal is for reading and a movie is for watching. Now, what purpose a slider will serve to your blog? It will simply show that you care more about the looks of your blog, which is okay, nothing wrong in that. But the time you will devote to have a good looking blog, you could have used that time for writing at-least 20-30 good articles. And these articles would have increased the visitors of your blog.
So what needs to be done for the perfect design of a pro blog?
1) Clean theme: It’s not like, since a journal is for reading anything and everything works. The theme what you are picking for your pro blog should be clean from sliders, too many navigation, galleries (unless you are an artist or a photo blogger), etc.
2) Easy navigation: You can make the navigation easy for the readers by making them simple. No drop downs and animations are required for a navigation.
3) No need for a magazine look: One or two columns would work fine. There’s no need for providing a magazine look because then you have to add images and then again you will spend some more time in looking for THAT perfect image for your post.
4) Responsive Design: Nowadays, almost everyone loves to read content in iPad and other tablets. It just feels nice to read in that way especially when you are not getting sleep and lying down in bed for hours. Also, there are a lot of people who use iPhone to read. Personally I don’t do that. The screen is very small and it gives me creeps. Anyways that’s me! Coming back to the point, a responsive theme increases the readership of your blog. It also works for any screen size. No matter, if someone is using a notebook a tablet, a desktop, or a cell phone, your blog looks the same to everyone.
5) Fast loading: You have to make sure that your blog loads fast. So, whatever is not required in the theme, strip it down. It’s also good from the SEO perspective. Search engines love fast loading sites and so will your readers.
6) Provide easy subscription options for RSS, Twitter and Facebook: Social media can bring in some real traffic to your blog. So, you have to convert a reader in to some sort of subscriber. Whether it is RSS feed, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest or Linkedin, it doesn’t matter. It’s all good when a reader stays connected to your blog in some or the other way.