The more contrast your blog's pages have, the easier they are to read, especially when you publish longer posts. Here are some quick suggestions, to supplement Check Your Typography.

1. Switch to a lighter theme.
2. Remove colored backgrounds. This could be as simple as tweaking some CSS code in your theme's stylesheet.
3. Increase the font size - small fonts make for dense text.
4. Increase leading - that is, increase the space between lines of text.
5. Don't use liquid-width themes.
6. Increase whitespace in general.

Decades of research for print media show two key characteristics of enjoyable reading experiences:

1. Content that does not exceed 4-5 inches in width. The human eye simply cannot easily read wide pages without fatigue. Which is why I just don't understand this love for liquid widths in some blog themes, just because someone has a 22-inch monitor. You might have a desire for ear-to-ear wraparound text, but your blog visitors probably will not.
2. Suitable leading between lines of text. The larger the font size you use, the greater the leading needs to be. Not increasing leading means that you increase page density and reduce the ability of the eye to distinguish lines of text without strain.

Understand that if you're young, you might not feel the eyestrain or fatigue right away. It can and will accumulate over time. I know whereof I speak.

Over the past four calendar years of blogging, I've jumped from one method to another while doing daily research. This hopping between methods is not premeditated, just incidental. For a while I'll use RSS readers, then I'll switch to Popurls clones, for monitoring the top blogs in a niche.

Still, there is one thing I do that stays pretty much consistent: using browser bookmarks. I keep the following folders:

1. Daily Sites - For sites that I want visit daily but don't necessarily want to have in my "niche dashboard."
2. Weekly Sites - For sites that I want to visit several times per week but don't need to visit daily.
3. Infrequent - For sites that I want to visit no more than once every week or two weeks.
4. To Read - for actual web pages that I want to fully read later, for improve my knowledge on a subject. Sometimes, these pages are not read for months, sometimes just weeks.

The key to successfully using these folders is to make a habit of it. Sure, you could use Del.icio.us for bookmarking. I have, but I find that I never actually go back and read any of those bookmarks. I find that keeping my Firefox browser bookmarks pane open at all times to be much more "in my face." So I'm far more likely to actually go back and read bookmarked URLs. It works for me; it might work for you.

You are 'designing' a blog and you stumble over the phrase 'article excerpt'.
What do you do? Ignore it?

I’m curious. Nowadays you see more and more blogs changing there blogposts to "Click here to Read the rest of this entry" posts.

The question about what people are using excerpts for was thrown up in “Click here to Read the rest of this entry” ???.

In general excerpts are a great way to condense content to give readers a faster way of scanning your article lists.

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Jumping into blogging is something that really should require a license. There are many ways to get started, some better than others, and all have implications that stretch far beyond what a newbie blogger expects.

I started a blog in late September and, frankly, have been learning as I go. I did do a LITTLE research first and had a concept that I thought would interest at least a few people. I knew I wanted to use my own URL for branding purposes, but beyond that I was stumped.

Mistake Number 1: Using the Quick Blogging Software my URL registrar had available.
In its favor, the software works well. And it is screamingly cheap. The problem is that there are some serious limitations to what it can do. For example:

• The software won't let me reorder even unpublished posts.
• The software won't let me schedule an item to appear later. I have to click a button to publish an entry.
• There are a few different templates but not a lot. I can customize them to an extent, but primarily elements of the look and feel.
• There are limitations on my ability to embed a piece of code into all pages. There are even MORE limitations on my ability to put certain types of code into the post.
• Half the time my sidebar items don't show up.

If I knew then what I know now I would have spent the extra money to get a hosted site running Wordpress. Yes, the learning curve would have been steeper, but I would have a lot more options in the long run.

Mistake Number 2: Not learning enough about monetizing strategies before I started.
I'm not trying to make a fortune but covering my costs would be nice. I've been fumbling through the process of adding things after the fact, trying not to offend anyone and yet trying to provide useful links. But there are people who know a lot about that already and from whom I could have learned.

Mistake Number 3: Not looking into design strategies before I started.
I am embarrassed to say that my first template was a black background with white lettering. I liked the image at the top, so I didn't think about it. And since my template choices are limited it took me a while to find one that fit my topic, appealed to me AND wasn't blinding white on black. Getting that bit right in advance would have ALSO saved me work in revamping sidebar items later to make them look right.

I am SURE that I have a lot to learn still; I don't quite understand a lot of my advertising options yet and I am considering changing to a WordPress hosted site. But so far I'm enjoying myself and still feel like I have a lot to say.

This list originally started off with 22 common mistakes that new bloggers tend to make. But while writing the list, other mistakes I'd made - and corroborated by other bloggers - came back to memory.

No blogger makes all of these mistakes, of course, but the list serves to help those of you who are still establishing your name in the blogosphere, and to remind you that you're not alone.

Design, Platform, Architecture, Hosting

1. No banner/ header graphic. Having a header graphic on your blog gives you a brand, even if it's simple. Not having one makes a page look odd and makes your site less memorable.
2. Choosing a poor blogging platform. It's important to choose the right platform. This will be hotly contested, but I believe the best blogging platform is WordPress. It's readily available, has literally thousands of free themes, hundreds of plugins, and is available for automatic installation with most popular hosting plans.
3. Poor blending of ads. I've seen evidence that even a targeted article in a high-CPC niche getting 3,000+ pageviews in a single day is no guarantee of getting high ad clicks. Especially if the ads on the page are poorly placed and/or not color-blended into the theme. (Keep in mind, too, that with some ad networks, high pageviews and no clicks reduces the CPC of those ads on your other sites - if you have others.)
4. Poor hosting. Good content and poor hosting makes for negative results if you become popular. Think Digg effect: if someone submits your content to a popular voting site and the story goes popular, expect your site to crash if your hosting sucks.
5. Using a really bad theme. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there are some truly bad themes out there. Having a nice theme has a psychological effect on visitors and increases the quality of your blog - at least in a perceived sense.
6. Cluttered themes. Keep your theme at least semi-attractive and uncluttered enough that it's easy to find things - such feed subscription buttons.
7. Not emphasizing your best content. Do what you have to highlight your best articles, including plugins to show the most popular posts, those with the most comments, links to similar posts, lists of recent posts, etc.

Of course, design isn't everything. You've heard the saying "content is king"...

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Last month, Splashpress Media (the parent outfit of Performancing) revealed a re-energized Blog-Tutorials.com. While Performancing is the place to go for your regular dose of professional/advanced blogging tips, Blog-Tutorials takes us back to the basics. Definitely useful for beginners; that's not to say that veterans won't pick up new things from the blog!

Here's an appetizer of some sorts, a quick list of several Blog-Tutorials posts that you might find helpful:

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I uploaded a list of blog directories to BloggerDir.com

Thanks to Sponsored Reviews for the orignal list

If you're new to blogging, there's enough advice out there in the blogosphere (and here at Performancing as well) to make your head swim. Information overload leads to analysis paralysis and in minutes you're back where you started - at the beginning, with no idea what to do.

In an effort to simplify the blogging process, here are 5 key mistakes bloggers (new, old, established, popular and unpopular) make, and how you can avoid them.

1. Procrastination

There are few worse things in life than sitting back and watching life roll by in front of you without taking advantage of the opportunities that keep knocking on your door. Sometimes we have limiting beliefs that hold us back (such as "I don't know how to write!"), other times we've got fears holding us back.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. - Mark Twain

The key is to take action on the ideas you have. You'll fail in 100% of the plans you never implement, but every plan you implement has a chance of success (and if you follow the next four tips, you can greatly increase that chance).

What are you going to do today?

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