15 Best practice tips when designing a blog site

Recently, I have had a client ask me what the best tips were for designing a blog site for their business. So I thought I post my reply here… Best practices tips when designing a blog site:- 1. Have a goal for your visitors and make sure it’s easy for them to navigate to what they are looking for. . 2. Don’t overwhelm them with information or options, get to the point. See point 1. . 3. Humanise your blog… people WANT to know how the people are behind your blog. . 4. Fancy doesn’t mean successful: a plain site is often more effective. . 5. Make your blog ‘sticky’: create content that engages so prospects will stay on your site longer and more likely to return. . 6. Setup Google Authorship: take credit and build your reputation by installing Google’s authorship code into each blog post. . 7. Lead capture form: all businesses should be building a database of prospects, give something away in exchange for lead information. . 8. Include a Sitemap: this helps visitors and search engine navigate through your blog. . 9. Add a Privacy Policy: let your visitors know that you will protect their information. . 10. Social sharing buttons: make it easy for visitors to share you content far and wide. . 11. Social follow buttons: encourage visitors to link with you using their favourite social media profile. . 12. Mobile-friendly: design your blog so that it looks good on both PCs and smartphones. . 13. Contact Us: include a map, contact details and a contact form to make it easy for visitors to contact you or to local your business. . 14. Use WORDPRESS.ORG…. (sorry, just that I love WordPress and so do search engines, so why not make it easy and give them what they want…) . 15. Lock it down: hacking is a huge problem these days, so you should install tough security features and ensure backups are done regularly. . Can you think of any other points that should be included when developing your blog site?