I’m taking a bit of a break from writing my contextual series to address a few crucial problems that I’ve been seeing on a daily basis. That is the lack of a good user experience. On any given day, I visit close to 50 different sites and use over a dozen apps. Of those I would say that 75% of them I would not visit or use if they had decent competitors. The biggest problems with sites and apps these days is that they like to bombard the users with information. I get that you want to make money from your ads, but displaying them elegantly will yield better results. Design is also crucial, these days the simple look works and it looks great.
I’ve built my site around the same principles that I talk about. Yes my blog has ads, but I in no way try to distract my readers from the content. I push users to signing up to my newsletter in a box that appears in the top right. That box is set only to be seen once a week. As for the look and feel, I kept things simple with no fancy logos, gradients, etc. While I may not get a huge amount of traffic, I am sure this design and approach could be used with great success from more popular bloggers.