Know 2017 design trends and use them
Let’s start the new year fresh! If you planned to redesign your site in 2017, here are the recent trends that have been implemented by many designers. Of course, no obligation to follow the crowd, but having a look at the design trends won’t hurt, and could provide you lots of inspiration.
- “Jumbotrons”: Big, bold components for calling extra attention to featured content or information.
- Non-rectangular headers
- Circular images with text beautifully wrapped around them.
- SVG images: Despite being around since soon two decades, SVGs have gained significant interest over the last two years.
- Big, bold typography and a more widespread use of serif fonts.
Speed up that website!
With more and more people browsing the web on their smartphones and the importance of loading speed in Google ranking system, a good website is a site that loads fast. How do you website ranks on Google PageSpeed Insight and Pingdom? Here are a few quick tips to improve your site loading speed.
- Use caching. The W3 Total Cache plugin is a must-have on any serious website.
- Switch to a quality web host (WP Engine, Hostgator, Vidahost, KickAssd…)
- Optimize your images for top speed.
- Get rid of unoptimized 3rd party scripts like the Facebook likebox.
- Use a fast WordPress theme.
More ideas… More content!
People visit blogs and online magazines for one thing: the content. All the rest is secondary. This is why creating useful content should be in your top priorities for 2017.
Finding what to blog about can sometimes be a bit tricky. Here are a few ideas:
- Check out the trends on Google trends and see if people are interested in what you’re planning to write.
- Make use of your real-life work experience: have you recently coded a revolutionary WordPress Theme for a client? Is your company doing cool things with jQuery? Talk about it!
- Follow other blogs in your niche and read a lot of posts from quality blogs. You’ll be surprised how easily ideas will come to your mind when you read and learn a lot from others.
Revive your old posts
You probably wrote very useful articles in the past. Just because they’re old doesn’t mean that none of them is useful anymore. Here are 3 ways to easily revive your old content:
- Use the Revive old posts WordPress plugin, which allows you to automatically tweet your old posts.
- When writing a new post, always link to other relevant articles from your blog. You can automate this process by using SEO Smart Links, a free WordPress plugin.
- Update your old articles, publish them again, and use a 301 redirection to automatically redirect the old one to the updated version. The Redirection plugin can definitely help for this.
Put more effort in your blog promotion
Writing great posts should be the priority of a blogger, but promoting the content you’ve created should always come as the close second. Promoting your blog posts will attract new visitors and clients, and could lead some of your best articles to go viral.
- Have a Twitter and Facebook account for your blog, and keep them updated.
- Promote your blog posts on different sites and platforms. Here’s a list of places to promote your content.
- A cheap and efficient way to promote your Facebook page and YouTube videos is Promolta. Check it out!
- Build and maintain an email list. Mailchimp and SendInBlue are definitely the best current services to manage email lists.
A few more tips…
Feeling perfectionist? That’s great! Here are a few more tips that I plan to apply myself and indeed encourage you to as well.
- Increase your social media presence and be available for your readers on Twitter and Facebook.
- Better safe than sorry: Always keep WordPress and its plugins up to date, and do regular backups. All in One Migration is a free plugin that can backup your database, themes, plugins and content. My preferred backup solution at the moment.
- Invite guest bloggers on your blog: having various authors with a different writing style and different views can be very refreshing for your visitors. Many bloggers will be willing to write free of charge on your blog, or you can invest a little and find a paid contributor.
- Keep SEO in mind and always looks for new ethical ways to make your blog rank higher on search engine result pages.