What Google Can Teach You About Your Blog’s Design

Do you know why Google’s homepage is so stark?

According to Marissa Mayer, President and CEO of Yahoo and one of the first 20 employees at Google, it wasn’t exactly planned that way.

Why Google’s Interface is So…Blah

As the company was being built, Google co-founder Sergey Brin had limited knowledge of web design. He would later tell Mayer, “We didn’t have a webmaster and I don’t do HTML.”

So, he put together the most basic web page he could  just to test the core functionality of the search engine.

In fact, the first version of Google didn’t even have a Search button. It relied solely on the user hitting the Return key.

As a result, one of the most iconic, and clean, user interfaces was born.

How It Was Received

Clean design was so strange during the time of Google’s launch that visitors often didn’t know what to do.

If you grew up on 90’s websites, you can relate. Most websites would overwhelm you with fancy images, underlined text, and flashing icons when you landed on their homepage.

Google was different. It was so different that during initial user studies at Stanford, participants would stare at the screen waiting, thinking the page was still loading.

Even though Google stumbled onto it, they quickly figured out the value of simplicity when it comes to a visitor’s experience online.

To this day, Google’s interface remains one of the cleanest on the Internet – and the most visited.

Bloggers need to learn from the likes of Google and start to embrace minimalism when it comes to their blogs.

Do less with your blog by limiting the amount of crap your throw at your audience each time they visit your page.

People Want Simplicity

People desire simplicity in their life.

Think about email. Why do we create an endless array of folders and neatly throw messages in each?

Why do we endlessly pursue the elusive inbox zero?

Even in our daily offline lives we seek simplicity. Why else would you clean your car or your house?

You want to make it nice to look at, presentable to others, and make it easier to find what you are looking for.

All of these same concepts also apply to your blog.

What Your Blog Visitors Want

You have less than 10 seconds to make an impression on a new visitor to your site.

If they land on a page that is covered with junk and very little white space, there is a high likelihood they will bounce and never come back.

Even if they stay, they will probably only scan your content. That is if they even find it amongst all of the clutter.

To reduce the risk of sensory overload, limit the amount of stuff you throw on your blog. That’s the way to your visitor’s heart.

Don’t put a HelloBar across the top, opt-ins all over the page, multiple menus and tabs, a SpeakPipe slide in, excessive pop-ups, and ads in every open spot.

Exercise restraint and go with more white space whenever possible.

Who Does Simplicity the Right Way?

I already touched on Google in the beginning. There’s no doubt that simplicity allowed them to squash the competition and to rise to the top of the online world.

While Yahoo was providing anything and everything on their landing page, overwhelming their visitors, Google simply provided one box for us to access anything the Internet had to offer.

Before long other search providers who tried to woo the visitor with endless content, such as Lycos and Alta Vista, met their demise.

If you are old like me, you remember those names.

Examples of Clean Website Design Dominating the Competition

Google used a simple interface to rock the online space, but who else implemented simplicity to grow their brand?

Consistent Interface

Facebook is one example where not just simplicity, but also consistency, led to dominating market share.

Think back to the beginning of Facebook. At the time, MySpace was the clear leader of the social media space.

But, MySpace was in complete disarray. Every person who had a page had free reign to design it however they wanted it.

The result was a convoluted mess each time you landed on someone’s page. Think black backgrounds with blue text and blinking images. Yeah, that bad.

Facebook came along and provided a clean, crisp, and consistent user interface.

While this may have been the result of having limited functionality at the time, everyone’s page looked relatively the same.

You knew where key features were going to be each time you landed on a page.

You knew where to find information about the person you were visiting. And that was huge!

Facebook clearly understood that providing a consistent clean experience for your user is paramount to growing your audience.

Focused Functionality

Medium is another recent practitioner of clean design.

Their site provides a ton of white space and embraces the art of writing for what it is. What you’ll find when visiting the site is access to the written word and not much else.

There are no opt-ins, no excessive imagery, and thankfully no ads.

Simple presentation of content with minimal distraction has allowed Medium to grow tremendously in the last several years.

Limited Noise

Twitter also represents clean design but in an unconventional way.

Typically when you think of the simplicity of design you think of the visual appearance of a website. With Twitter, cleanliness is achieved by limiting content to a set character limit.

Everyone has to operate within the same 140 character constraints.

As a result, everything is presented orderly and consumed easily. Again, a huge win for the company and for those that use the service.

In Conclusion

In today’s hyper-competitive world where you struggle as a blogger to stand out from the rest, you need to cater to your audience.

They want simplicity. They don’t want to have to hunt and scan through your page to find what they are looking for.

Set your page up with a consistent and clean design and enable your readers to have an enjoyable experience that makes them want to come back for more.