This is the third post in my 6 Beginning Blogger Mistakes series.

I’d like you to picture the fattest, ugliest woman you’ve ever seen. Now add about 50lbs. in your mind. Got it? Lost your appetite yet? Great. Would you date her? Hell no! She’s ugly, enormous and probably smells bad. Now what if she was the most interesting person you’ll ever meet and spectacular in bed? Well, you’ll never know because she’s so ugly you’ll never get close enough to find out.

That fat woman is your blog.

Well, she’s your blog if you decide to make it entirely ugly and impossible to look at. No one’s going to take the time to read your blog to find out if it’s any good. This is a very common problem with beginning bloggers. They ignore the fact that someone might want to read their blog other than themselves.

Yellow and orange might be your favorite colors but they make terrible choice for a font and background. This site is black on white at this moment. It’s authoritative and standard. It’s boring but no one ever left a site because they couldn’t read the white and black text. When chosing a color scheme remember that there are millions of people who can’t read a website unless it has contrasting colors. Nothing contrasts more than white and black. So chose one dark color and one bright color for your background/text. Make sure they match. Ask a gay person if you don’t know what colors match.

Using the default template on Wordpress is ugly because we’ve seen it so many times. It says you’re lazy and you don’t care about how your blog looks. By extension you probably don’t care about what’s going on inside your blog as well.

Also try not to use totally crappy images. Your greasy camera phone photo might be great for you Facebook page but if you’re expecting people to visit your site over and over again you’ve got to upgrade. The only time you can get away with a crappy photo is if you somehow snuck a picture of some yet to be released highly anticipated thing. Like a new cell phone or some behind the scenes image from a movie (yes, pornos count). You can steal photos off the net (like me, questionably ethical) or if you want to spend money go to a stock photo site and pay a small amount for a photo to use it legally.

Remember my blogging like Apple example on focusing too much on aesthetics? Well there’s another major computer company that has no idea how to make something pretty. I’m talking about our old friend IBM. They make some of the best computers in the business. Well, they did before they sold their business to a Chinese company. The example still stands. IBM laptops are like tanks. They keep working no matter what. I’ve been using them for years and have never had a single problem that wasn’t Microsoft’s fault. IBM is also quite innovative. They have neat features that save your hard drive from getting damaged if you drop your computer and their keyboards are the best in the laptop business. Yet you have convince people of all of this over and over again. Why? Because IBM laptops look like black boxes. They’re ugly and they all look exactly alike. Be as innovative and creative with your blog as IBM is with its computers but please learn how to design better. It’s so much easier to sell someone a good looking computer than an ugly one.

Stay tuned for the next installment of my 6 Beginning Blogger Mistakes series where I discuss suffocating ads.