StumbleUpon and Six Design Pitfalls to Stay Away From

April 10, 2011 by Daniel Sharkov|

These last two weeks I “discovered” a great new traffic source called StumbleUpon. Not a revolutionary discovery to say the least. Although my expectations weren’t too high, I began putting more time into squeezing traffic from the site. Once I started stumbling, it actually got quite addictive.

It turned out that spending time on StumbleUpon was not such a bad idea. First there’s the potential of getting new visitors and readers for your blog and secondly you get to find literally dozens of blogs and websites you never knew about before. Some of the finds were nothing short of great, while others… not that good, with either good content and bad design or vice versa.

Namely design is the subject for today’s article. The not-that-good blogs actually inspired me to put up an article, outlining some common design mistakes made by many newbie (and not only) bloggers. And here it is! Below you will see a list with the top six design mistakes to avoid.

The Topic of Your Blog is Not Obvious

If you want to keep visitors longeron your site, you have to make sure they know exactly what you can offer. To make matters worse you only have seconds to do it. Don’t worry though – It is not as challenging as it might seem. Including a short description in the header section is just enough. A sentence or even two-three words about your blog’s topic will do the trick. The whole process doesn’t take more than five minutes, but it gives a huge helping hand to newcomers on your site.

I was guilty for not applying that until some days ago when I finally did. Although even a week hasn’t passed, I am already seeing positive results . Visitors are staying a bit (about 20 seconds) longer than before making that change.

Articles are Not Easy To Scan

Most of the internet surfers are quite lazy. If they are searching for something specific, they wouldn’t waste time reading a 1000 word article. Clicking the back button and choosing the next page in the search results is far easier. It’s no different when they are NOT searching for something specific like StumbleUpon users. Those folks are even more impatient – your article doesn’t stand a chance if nothing grabs their attention in two seconds time.

All of this does not mean that you should stay away from long articles. Nope, not at all! There are always people who read from beginning to end. You just need to structure your articles so that the essential points are easily visible and can be read right away.

Bold the most important sentences, include bullet points where appropriate and use subheadings. The first two cannot always be applied. Using subheadings though, is an absolute must in every article you write. Also consider making the subheadings themselves more eye-catching. Use underlining, change their color or add an image. There are hundreds of possibilities.

Your Blog Plays Automated Sound

That is the worst possible idea to utilize on your blog. Let’s say you are one of those StumbleUpon users who likes listening to music, while stumbling and trying to find something worthwhile. You have maxed out your speakers with Beethoven or maybe Dr. Dre in your music player, when all of a sudden a voice literally starts screaming at you in the hopes of turning you into a subscriber or selling you a copy of the latest and most awesome book on making money online. It takes you like two minutes to stop the annoying sound, by which time your favorite song has already ended.

If I were in a similar position, I would have definitely felt quite pissed off and clicking the dislike button on the StumbleUpon toolbar would be the least to do. Hope you got the idea. In case you haven’t – do not include automated sound to “greet” visitors with!

Not Using Proper Font Size

That is another common problem I stumbled upon while stumbling on StumbleUpon. When it comes to blogs, content in the form of text is the most important component. This means that a simple change in the font size with even a pixel can make a big difference – either positive or negative.

After a lot of testing, I came to the conclusion that a font size of 13px works the best . It has the perfect balance – not to big, so that it doesn’t ruin the looks of the page and not too small, so that people wouldn’t have to zoom in to actually read the text.

Bad Font Formatting

As I said earlier, using bold to stress on the important sections of an article is a good idea. It is probably the only good idea when it comes to formatting text. All other kinds of emphasizing must be avoided.

For instance underlining words can make them look like links and distinguishing links from text is a golden rule. It must be obvious for a reader when something can actually be clicked and when not. Using colors is another generally bad idea. All in all confining yourself to using only bold and occasionally italic is the way to go.

External Pages are Opened in New Window

There’s a pretty good reason for the back button to be present in every single browser. That simple but effective solution eliminates the hassle of having twenty separate browser windows opened in your taskbar.

People like freedom – they like to be able to choose on their own. If they liked the article they were reading before clicking that link, they will hit the back button. On the other hand if your article sucks it will get closed anyway, even if links do open in a different window. Simple as that!

So if you think you’ve just hit the nail with discovering how to make links open in new window, think again!

Your Thoughts

As always I’m looking forward to hearing your two cents on the subject in the comments section. Do you agree with the points presented? What other design pitfalls can you think of? All comments and critics are more than welcome!

Post Written by Daniel Sharkov

I’m Daniel, an 18 year old student and the author of this blog. My articles cover a variety of topics, including blogging and writing tips, social media, traffic generation and more. Connect with me on Twitter, Facebookand Google+.

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