Are visitors coming in to your blog - which you feel has great content - but they're not returning? Maybe your typography is at fault. Bad font choices (family, size, color) make for a poor reading experience.

I'm surprised at how many of my colleagues don't realize that their blog is difficult to read. Most of them don't mind my saying so because it's constructive criticism. (I've had a long love affair with the printed word and with typography in general, though I am not a designer.)

So if someone, maybe me, tells you your blog posts are hard to read, don't be offended. They took the time to tell you. It doesn't mean your site is not otherwise visually appealing, just that good web typography might make a significant difference in your site's success.

Here are the regular culprits:

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For a niche oriented blogger it is pretty natural to come up with new subject ideas all the time. Raj wrote an inspiring article How Many Niches Should You Pro-Blog? but focused on the questions involved and the problems showing up when doing multi-niche blogging.

Let me show you my very 1st concept phases for a new website.

The basic idea is to work out a content concept 1st and to ignore design issues. If you fall into the trap of designing a new site 1st then you will see how decelerating design issues are.

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I'm looking for a redesign of Businesspundit.com - any blog designers want to take on a high profile redesign to help build your design portfolio?

I'd like it to have a nice, bold look like

http://freelanceswitch.com/
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/
http://northxeast.com/

If you're interested, please contact me (Ryan) at ryan at college-startup.com or PM me via the Perf private message form or hit me up on Twitter ( http://twitter.com/RyanCaldwell )

A few days ago, I was able to interview Steven Snell from Vandelay Design. In less than a year, Steven's blog has become one of the most read blogs in the "blog design and usability" niche. In fact, the Vandelay Design Blog has over 1000 subscribers to its feed, a major milestone.

One of the reasons I picked Steven for an interview is that I believe he's performing the art of using a business blog to perfection. Unlike so many corporate blogs, that seem to exist just to exist because it's trendy, Steven's blog provides useful information, establishes his knowledge and authority, and makes his customers confident in his abilities. Most importantly, it gets him business. I know excellence in execution when I see it...so I present to you an interview with Steven Snell, from Vandelay Design.

1. Tell us a little bit about your design business, how long you've been on the web, and the services you provide.

Vandelay Website Design has been in business for about a year. We provide web design, blog customization and website maintenance/updates. The blog has been online online for about 9 months, with the first 3 months being very inactive.

2. I believe that all businesses should use blogs for promoting their business. But so many either don't, or do a poor job at it. How do you use your blog to promote your business?

Well, first of all, I agree that blogs are a great tool for any business that has the resources to run a blog. The whole purpose for starting the blog for Vandelay Design was to get some additional content on the site that would draw search engine traffic, and ultimately more web design business. There are so many web design companies out there that it's extremely difficult for a new one to compete well in search engines for popular words and phrases. The blog posts obviously create additional pages on the site that draw some long tail searches. In recent months the blog audience has really grown steadily and the blog itself is now more of an asset then was originally planned. The search traffic is now taking a back seat to additional opportunities that might be possible, like developing new services (such as marketing, consulting, etc.) that could be promoted through the blog. Actually, when I saw the announcement last week that Performancing is offering some new services I thought it was ironic because that is almost exactly what I would like to do at some point.

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Can you please step back and look at your blog like a 1st time visitor?
Does the single article view answer the readers question immediately?

Is your homepage a 5* hotel lobby or a cluttered discount shop?

"I have no idea how to find something on your page." Could this be the #1 answer of a 1st time visitor when arriving at your blog?

Believe it or not but this is the main difference between people used to read blogs and standard Susan Surfer. Standard websurfers have no idea how a blog works. They want to SUCK information. FAST!

From: Attracting Joe Surfer to stay: It's the navigation stupid

How many 1st time visitors do you have? I assume that a standard medium traffic blog has between 60% and 90% 1st time visitors. Please don't expect blogging knowledge from your 1st time visitors!

Some basics, a provocation and five 'go read' link tips...

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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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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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If you browse the WordPress Theme Viewer, take notice of where most designers place their page links. Most designers put them in a horizontal menu either directly above or below their header image. What you might also notice is that many designers treat the links like tabs with a link hover effect. Sometimes, that link style (something that sets the tab apart on hover) will be shared with an active page style. In other words, a tab will look different than the other tabs when it is either being hovered over by the mouse, or if the tab represents a page that is currently active.

Thankfully, the good folks at WordPress decided to add a great little feature to the wp_list_pages function. When a page is active, the list item that represents that page gets a class added to it called "current_page_item". This is in addition to the "page_item" class that is on all page list elements (elements can have multiple classes). So now that we know that this new class is automatically added to active list items, we can take advantage of that and style that element based on the class, to demonstrate that the page tab is active.

As always, I'm assuming you know basic web coding, and this isn't a tutorial on how to make tabs in CSS. If you need help with that, check out Listamatic.

The WordPress Template Code

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If you take a look at some blogs, you may notice that they have their search bar in some odd places. Some put it in the header, some put it in the horizontal navigation bar, some in the sidebar. I personally like to have it in either the header or in the navigation menu. It seems like that's always the first place I look when I want to find the search bar.

But getting the search bar positioned correctly can be frustrating, especially if you are using the entire header area to fit your logo.

So today, we're going to position the search bar absolutely, within the header. I normally don't recommend absolute positioning, because much of the time it's not necessary, and if you can avoid it, definitely try to keep your positioning normal. But in this case, I think an exception is in order ... so let's get started!

First, let's look at the header. For this article, I'll use the a theme I created a while back called RockinSuckerfish (the 2 column version). Let's look at some of the header code:

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Long posts or short posts, I’m sure you’ve encountered the question. Longer means more content to reed the spiders and the deep readers. Shorter means casual readers are more likely to stay longer and read deeper.

Readers, those readers, unlike spiders, can’t be configured to do what we think they are supposed to.

When readers glance or glimpse our blog page, we’ve got a blink to draw them in. A blink isn’t long enough to read, or even sample, the content. A blink is exactly that – a blink. We're talking a matter of seconds.

Being Blind to the Old

If we’ve been with a blog for more than two weeks, unless we’re in a redesign, we're used to how it looks. Our brain filters out what is no longer new, so that we can concentrate the changes in our blog environment that are useful to us.

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Update: Thanks for all the advice. This has been resolved painlessly.

I've had a big dilema this week. Someone ripped off a design I paid dearly for. They said they did it in admiration. But my investment has basically been watered down by the theft. That's what it is plain and simple. As probloggers we shouldn't have to deal with this. But alas we do.

This stuff has been happening so often these days I have no way to stay on top of it. In this case I've been laid back and haven't ripped into the person. In days past I would have.

But I'm stumped neither I,nor the designer are happy about it. And yet the person who ripped us off doesn't seem to understand what they've done.

Maybe because I'm so into design I can't understand it. But what compels people to take CSS modify it slightly and claim it as their own without attribution?

Maybe if I could understand the psychology of it, then it would help. But I merely can't and probably will never understand.

I need some advice. How should I proceed next? I'm still not happy after conversations, emails, and the like.