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Designers especially the newbies go frantic on how to go about it. It has to be attractive, engrossing, user-friendly and functional. Thus, unraveling the secrets will definitely bind the website.

So, what are these layout secrets?

Together let us unfold them one after another…

1. Centering it all is no good. The secret is doing the contrary and not centering everything. The latter will just make the page disorganized, strewn and drab. The alignment may also seem weak and wanting.

2. The use and mastery of contrast is indispensable. Contrast is one thing that makes the page attractive. The use and mastery of it in color, value, size and weight will greatly affect the site’s appearance and edge. In fact a typeface may appear bigger with the use of contrast in color. The latter can also affect the look of organization of the page. At a glance, a page may appear organized or the exact opposite. That is the secret of contrast.

3. Apply deviations if necessary. Most of the designers practice nowadays is to develop a ‘uniform-pages’ look. They try to use same background colors and other peculiarities to establish similarities to the homepage or other pages. But the fact is that viewers can be easily bored with that scheme. Viewers always want something new and by giving them a repetitious work, they are pissed off and transfer to another site where they can feast both their eyes and mind.

Placing lines in between contents also manifests division. Instead of using these lines, use blank ‘buffer zones’. This way what are created are invisible lines to make the effect subtle.

4. Do not forget that functionality is the king of web development. Moreover, keep the content and information full, tight and pretty useful. Use the space, don’t waste. Only leave a small percentage for blank spaces. Use the space cleverly in order for the website not to look crowded at the same time loose. Multiple columns are also advisable in order to maximize space.

These four topmost secrets in page layout are so crucial that to break them may spell disaster or the end of your precious site.

In “1 – Blogging: Let’s Get You Started” we ended with the subject of content. Fresh topics are important to keep your blog readership interested, and now we’re going to discuss just how you can do that.

What are you going to write about? It should be a topic that you’re passionate about or are at the very least interested in. If you’ve chosen blogging as your new career, then you don’t want to torture yourself by writing about something that you have zero interest in, otherwise you might as well return to that mundane job you just quit!

Feelings and emotions show through your writing, so your readers will notice any indifference you may have toward a certain topic that you find boring. Don’t forget the advice about writing with a personality. Forced writing will not establish you in the world of blogging at all.

Once you’ve chosen your main theme — or if it has chosen you, then that’s even better — start posting to your blog and try to get into the habit of doing that at least once every day. It doesn’t always need to be a long post; it could be a comment on something you read in the newspaper today or a segment that you saw on the breakfast news program on TV. Think of yourself as a gigantic container ship, that needs a lot of effort to get moving. At first, you’ll budge just a foot or two and later you’ll trudge slowly on until you’re at full speed. Before you know it, it’ll take a lot of effort to stop you!

Nevertheless, regardless of how well you know your topic, you’re going to run out of fresh input at some point, so let’s look at some content brainstorm ideas.

1) Check out what other bloggers have to say on the current state of affairs in your field of discussion. You can find related blogs by visiting http://blogsearch.google.com/ or http://www.technorati.com. You’ll learn from other blogs and you can also comment on what others have to say on your own blog!

2) Once you’ve established contact with other bloggers, you’ll have almost inexhaustible input to keep you going for a while, so there won’t be an acute need to search for content to write about. Should you still be stuck, then you can search for news articles related to your niche in you local newspaper or online.

3) By joining a few forums related to your niche — just choose the ones that are the most focused on your particular area — you can engage in conversations with others who share your interests. This is a great way to build up a Q&A bank and interesting discussion topics to write about. An added bonus is that your forum posts will quite handily generate traffic for your blog and, hopefully, profits.

Try to maintain your daily posting habit. The major search engines love fresh content and they are more likely to spider your blog frequently, which will also result in getting you extra traffic.

The subject of traffic will be discussed in a future article, so don’t worry about that right now. Just keep writing and posting and building up that momentum — you’ll be an established blogger before you know it!