Lasting Rose

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If you were visiting a new town center or supermarket without any one to guide you what will you look for? Visitors to your blog are no different, they look for easy Navigation!
If you choose to have an out of the box presentation of your blog, like Lasting Rose, which has been dubbed a  BLOGOID, it is all the more important to provide a good navigation of the site, toengage your visitors and persuade them to stay on and probe your contents.

One of the newer means of navigation in a blog which has been around for sometime, with several scores of postings to its credit, is the Tag Cloud, which you can build from the tags you attach to each of your posts. However, as your posts and tags grow, so does your cloud, which then become difficult to wade through and loose its attention.
However, Tag Cloud can be presented in new stunning eye catching ways by clever scripts from Way2Blogging like what they call a Wordle Type Flash Label Cloud, like the one installed on Lasting Rose. The advantage is the easy and distinctive readability of the cloud which gives a better chance for your topic to be browsed.

As the posts and tags grow, the Navigation becomes less manageable, with long lists of posts no one will wade through. The chances that visitors will attempt to look for older posts can greatly be improved if the lists can be condensed to easy drop down menus, which you can click to choose a particular label you are interested in. The drop Down Labels widget from spiceupyourblog  can be easily installed and will greatly enhance the navigation of your site and give your visitors a good sense of being in control while they are on your site.



The Blogger Archive Calendar  from phydeaux3, though available from 2007, is a little utilized navigation widget for GOOGLE Blogger which has great features. This widget easily provides your visitors with simplicity and speed of searching for data in a searchable calendar format, which highlights the dates you have published something. The widget is fully integrated in to the “customize” feature of the popular “Blogger in Draft”, giving you the facility to greatly enhance its visual appeal by matching with your bog’s features.
One of the problems a Blogger will encounter as the blog grows older is the growing number of posts. These large numbers cause, depending on the label or key word you search, to pull up long lists of posts, which again is of not much use to the visitors. One solution for this problem is to present the search results only as Post Headings using mods to the script like this one  from myoutsourcedbrain, though I prefer the method of limiting the number of results.
This number limiting feature can be easily implemented by the script from spiceupyourblog, though with my template, I had to use the “escaped” code   + "?max-results=5" from One stop Blogging Resources.
A bit of googling can find the right resource to improve the navigation of your blog which is the key to get new visitors interested in your blog and come back for more.

Article first published as How Your Blog Navigation Can Send Your Visitors Away! on Technorati.