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Read Me First

I haven’t been in the blogging business too long, only about six months really, and I have only been really reading a lot of blogs for around a year now, which means I’m still a newcomer to the blogoshpere. But, even someone relatively new on the scene has noticed a huge trend. This trend is a bunch of cluttered blog defacing the web. Some bloggers think that they need every widget, and every link viewable on every page, which is normally done through the sidebar and footer. This can get extremely annoying, especially when the sidebar is cluttered. Now, I refuse to read the blog if it is a royal mess of clutterness. Here are some tips to help you un-clutter your blog:

Unclutter That Sidebar

1. Move the archives to their own “Archives” page. If someone genuinely wants to dig through your blog to look at old posts, then they will follow links for monthly archives. No one wants to see every single post title on every single page of your blog. After a while, that list could get pretty darn long. If you want to show you best posts, then try utilizing a Most Popular Posts Plug-In .

2. Remove unnecessary widgets. This includes social site widgets, recent everything (except posts), widgets, top commenters, Alexa, Blogshares, Calendars, and all the rest of them.

3. Consolidate your RSS Feed Buttons. Remove all the “Subscribe using (specific service here), and just use one, generic subscribe button. If you must, though, choose your favorite service, and include put it in there, but remember, only one.

4. Cut down the blogroll, or cut it out. Move it to its own page if it includes over 8 links. If anyone is interested in looking at it, then they will go to that page.

5. Remove the “Meta”. Unless you have a multitude of people logging into your blog, no one will miss this.

6. Keep your category list small. Somewhere around 10 is a good number. Always strive for under 20, because the longer the list, the more your blog will look like it is jumping around from topic to topic.

7. Remove “spam blocked” counts. The readers don’t care how mush spam Akismet has blocked, they just don’t. Everyone who downloads WordPress gets this anyway, so it doesn’t need any extra advertising from you.

8. Remove e-mail subscription forms. Lots of readers, including myself, have confused these with search boxes, and popped in a search only to get an “invalid email address”. Barely anyone uses email anyway, just ride that RSS train.

9. Choose a category cloud or category list. Using both takes up too much space and is just redundant, avoid using both at all costs.

10. Remove buttons and badges for other sites. They will go great on your blogroll’s page, which you probably made after reading #4.

Final Comments

I hope you found these tips useful, and if you have any more tips, please share them with me and the rest of the readers.