5 Simple Ways to Make Your Blog Design POP

In “The Secret of Great Blog Designs,” I talked about using schemas and the peak-end rule to not only make your blog design more memorable, but to also associate your blog with the concepts, images, and ideas that will help you towards your goals. Before we can go deeper into that, we have to first make our blog design POP.
What does it mean to make a blog design POP? A blog design that pops is simply one that grabs people’s attention and can often times evoke a “Wow!” Does it mean that you must make your blog really extreme in order to get noticed? No, it does not, especially if you are doing it just for the sake of getting it noticed. The pursuit of just that one goal alone won’t get your blog design very far.

But if your blog design does not pop at all, it will simply go unnoticed and disappear into the masses of everyday blogs. First we must understand how to make something pop before we go into what we can do to make our blog designs pop. It has been show in studies that humans have two ways of scanning visual elements when they are searching for something.

Parallel processing - This is an automatic and unconscious processing that occurs first and is done by taking everything in at once. It is a very quick and simultaneous processing that uses associations to understand what it is looking at. What that basically means is that you have no control over it and it is done instantly.

Serial processing - This is a very deliberate and conscious processing that we use when parallel processing doesn’t yield the results we want. It is a very slow and sequential processing that uses rules to find things and is done consciously. What that basically means is that if a person is still motivated to find something, they would use this or just give up altogether.

In order to make something pop, we must get it so that the parallel processing picks it up instantly. If it doesn’t pop, then there is no guarantee that a person would put in the effort to look beyond the blog design. They might if they believe that you have what they are looking for somewhere on your blog, if not they will leave.