When building your blog, it is important to have usability in mind. If the potential reader is irritated by the layout or design of your blog, they will not visit your blog again.

According to marketing gurus, you need to retain a reader within the first ten seconds; else you will lose this reader. Hence it is important to practice good blog design and branding.

When we design our blog, we take into consideration the 10 most hated blog design on our list:

1. Blog taking “donkey” minutes to load can be very frustrating. If a blog cannot get loaded within 1 minute without any valid reason (e.g. this is a photo blog, so it takes time),readers will usually try a reload (in case it is due to browser problem), and once it is confirm it is due to poor blog design, readers will move on to the next blog
2. Too many advertisements with too little contents. Bloggers hope to make money, but if more than 50% of the layout is filled with ads compare to the contents, this blog is out
3. Pop-up is one of the worst inventions on the internet. It is irritating, and makes the blog looks like a porn site
4. Preview or skip this ad is the next more irritating invention of the internet after pop-ups, especially if it takes up the whole screen, and the “skip this ad” button is slow to response
5. Background music can be nice, but sometimes it affected the loading speed. If the reader is enjoying his music on his computer while surfing the net, do you think the reader will be happy?
6. Large picture is nice but if it takes long time to load, then it became a problem
7. Some websites are design using flash. It is nice, but navigating them as it can be a pain (sorry Adobe, but this is the truth). Some sites use so much of the flash feature that the time taken to navigate each page can drive you crazy. The developer who design it must have run it from his local area network without any consideration for the internet users
8. Bad color combination and overwhelming design. Some blog designs are so bad that it is a pain to the eyes to navigate it as readers can get overwhelm by the design more than the content
9. Poor menu placement, resulting in poor navigation experience. Obviously, WordPress has more superior design features as compared to Blogger. For those using Blogger, well thought out tags name and layout is essential for a total user experience
10. Too much words, or the article is too long. If you are a very good writer, or if you are writing a novel on your blog, this does not apply. If not, it is a good practice to include pictures with words.

Do you have your own 10 most hated blog design? Share your thoughts with us.