BT#3 - making the most of your space

Imagine you have the biggest bedroom in the house, yet only have a bed and a chair in one corner. Now translate that to your blog, you have a whole page to fill don't just limit yourself to a tiny portion in the centre of your screen. Excessive white space can be off putting to readers and makes your blog look small and cramped. Deciding what size to make your blog can be tricky, personally I say anywhere between 990px and 1100px are the best widths to use to get the most out of your blog without having to actually move your head to read your posts. 

Then you have to decide what size to make your sidebar. Again, I would recommend anywhere from 300px to 330px to get a good sidebar without it being too hard to see, or overpowering your page. You still want the emphasis to be on your posts! Once you have these sorted, make sure you are using that magic code mentioned in THIS POST so that you aren't harbouring excess white space that could be being utilised. 

Now, and maybe most importantly, uniformity. Having a clean scroll is vital in keeping your blog looking fresh and professional! Two tips I have are making all your post photos the same size and making all your post text justified! These really are down to personal taste, but I find it the most pleasing to the eye! Having photos that are all the same width (even if two are next to each other to make up one width) and then having your post text also at the same width by making it justified just helps to keep the eye scrolling without having to gravitate to one side, or the centre. 

If you manage this via your blogs customise button, then there is no need to change anything when writing your post. The amount of blogs I have designed where they change the font of their posts manually every time when they could fix them all at once is monumental. Here's how:

CUSTOMISE > PAGE TEXT > Choose the font you want, the size and the colour!

CUSTOMISE > ADVANCED > Add CSS:

.post-body{
font-family: open sans!important;
text-align: justify!important;
}

Make sure the font you write in the code is the same font that you chose on the PAGE TEXT tab. Also be aware, this will only work if you have your posts set to DEFAULT FONT / NORMAL SIZE / NORMAL (in the drop down option) You may need to go back and manually choose JUSTIFY and DEFAULT FONT on some of your old posts to get them to show the new changes.

If you have any questions, use the contact me tab and I hope this tip is useful!