If you started off with your blog a decade or so back, you would have been among the very few to have ventured into the new way of living online with very few competing for the space that you planned to conquer. With time, the blogging phenomenon grew fast and wild and all pervasive that it has now successfully invaded the realms of what is now called, for sake of clarity as being different from online resources, mainstream media. With a growing presence and influence of blogs on public opinion, carving a niche for the blogger that made his space unique, became of utmost importance. However, with every niche being filled in with more and more bloggers walking into cyberspace, carving a niche alone is not something that could get you the trophy.

Blog Designs and Blog Layouts: This is where Blog Layouts and blog Designs come into the picture. The idea is in response to a simple question – how do you differentiate your blog from among the thousands and thousands of blogs that pop up each day? Is customisation the key to get people hooked on to your blog? Or is it going to be giving them something poignant and off-beat and making them get attuned to your tastes?

In my view, customisation is not the key for success with blogs. In marketing parlance, customisation would mean adapting your blog to individual tastes. While you can be pretty sure this one is not for the average blogger who is by no means an expert in web design and development, some websites may try customisation as a way to mark themselves apart from the rest. To illustrate customisation, Google lets you choose themes so that your mail box stands out from the rest. Blogger lets you choose themes and layouts. For instance, there are cars that let you choose everything in it from the seat texture to seat colours to upholstery, the type of wheels, steering designs . . . you name it, you would have it. I’m not sure if an average reader is going to be bothered about ‘customising’ what he reads.

But you can offer something different – for instance, there is this blog, rin-wendy.com, which has clearly demarcated parts to its pages – one for the husband and one for the wife. The blue segment on the left is posted by the hubby while the pink on the right is getting updated by the better half. Is it not cool to have two people and couples in that, sharing their lives post on the same page in two sections? That would be thinking out of the box, perhaps. If nothing else, Rin and Wendy have at least found mention in this piece with their innovative thinking.

If you want to make your blog stand apart from the rest of the crowd, you would have to think in terms of what is it that can be done and which are the ‘rules’ in blogging that need not be followed. For a while, forget about the regular sections of archives, tags, categories and so forth. You decide how you could let your readers browse through your content and what would be the most satisfying experience for them, depending on your theme and context. If you are going to feature a lot of videos in your blog, for instance, why post them one after the other and arrange them chronologically, separate them by dates they were posted? You could choose a layout based only on categories, for instance – fun, education, sports and health. Choose a layout that may start with the fun section at the top and you could perhaps have your blog heading beneath it. Feature different videos for the visitor so that he gets involved in the animation.

One important aspect about blogs that have been on for years now is that they could be having contents of high value but they may be lying hidden somewhere amidst the piles of data. If you had written an excellent post about website design a couple of years back, you can be almost sure that no one would read it now. It is important to give provisions for such a gem to be highlighted on the home page. The “Featured” section could do the job for you, but as you would appreciate, there can not be too many posts that are featured on the main page. After you have made space for “Featured” posts, spend some time in updating the featured tag with different posts that reflect the best of your blog, from time to time. Make a list of your best posts and keep a schedule of the dates when they get featured. Keep shuffling them around, perhaps every week or so, to make sure your best posts appear on the main page.

Do away with the traditional thinking and norms. Your blog layout could be just as different as your unique creativity.