Readers Deserve a Better Reading Experience

After browsing hundreds of personal websites, I started understanding one important thing: besides content, simple, nice, and clean blog designs make me keep coming back.

Defining simple, nice, and clean design

Simple design, in my opinion, means that the website's main focus is clear and big. I feel like there is guidance on what the owner wants me to do.

Nice design, in my opinion, means that the website's appearance is not what the owner intends to highlight, and instead, the owner develops the design to help readers get the content. Some websites focus on the design instead of the content. I like looking at new designs. But I rarely find the ones that I love. I like exploring. But I am not easily liking what I see. Simply, a design that makes content accessible and easy to read is what I mean by nice design.

Clean design, in my opinion, means that the website has enough color contrast and looks modern. I do not hate nostalgic-looking websites. But I prefer modern-looking websites.

To get specific examples, here are some websites that I think have simple, nice, and clean design:

• Cauê Napier is very simple. It does not have any distractions. It uses plain black and white colors as the main theme. There are two interesting features that I notice: TownSquare and four choices on the about page.
• Bear Blog's default design is simple. A one-column layout gives readers the best reading experience.
• Zakhary has a unique design. I quite like the colors. The main content is horizontally in the middle.

I am sharing with you my personal taste in blog designs. If yours are different, that is fine.

Improving your blog with practical actions

• Prioritize simplicity.
• Do not use the default font size for your website. Increase it so that most users do not need to zoom in. tempertemper is a good example and is exactly what I mean.
• Have strong color contrast, preferably a black background and white text.
• Choose readable fonts. Do not use strange-looking fonts.
• Prefer commonly used words.
• Your design should highlight your content. Do not make your design a lot better than your content.
• Have a dark theme.
• Use common patterns for your blog design.
• Limit line length. You can have 55–75 characters for the body text.
• Simplify, simplify, simplify.