13 Fitness Website Design Tips

Typing the words blogging tips into Google will grab you 19,500,000 results as of today.  That is alot of information for anyone to read and absorb.  Some blogs will post their Top 7 Tips for 7 Figures or 59 Blogging Secrets for Success.  But do you have time to read all of them?

The most likely answer is no, but if you follow one blog and they break down these tips into Top 10 lists like Letterman than you have a chance to continually improve your blog.  So thats just what this is post is setup to do, provide you with a bunch of tips that you can use right away.

Most of these will be design or organization based but there are going to be some that probably so good they need to be stated here as well.  Shall we dance? Lets go.  In no specific order…

1.  Blog to your local fitness market if you run bootcamps or training.

On Kick Back Life Craig Ballantyne dropped a guest post that tied into my first tip.  Craig said,”Focus on being the go-to “Authority” in your niche market.” When many people start blogging they are trying to dominate their local area for boot camps and personal training, yet they are trying to blog to the world.  If your product is local, blog to your community and the needs of your clients.

If your product is worldwide, then well your a small fish in a big pond.  You’re not selling bootcamps to people in other countries, so talk about your town and your workouts, do videos, and become a local celebrity.  Your business will boom.

2.  Present your ideas visually

In today’s culture of scanning and clicking, long blocks of text aren’t read. Break up your text with visuals—graphs, charts, photos, blockquotes, and videos. Annotate the images to reinforce your meaning.  If you get photos from other blogs or from Flickr, include a link back to the source. Most popular blogs are visually rich.  Try to find images that relevant to your post if possible, unless your site is themed in some way differently. from Id Rather Be Writing

3.  If you are serious about blogging buy your own domain

Don’t even think about using a blogspot or wordpress.com if you want to have a serious blog.  Some people have success with it, but thats because they post often, have big followings, and are years old.  I can think of two that come to mind, Craig Ballantyne’s Turbulence Training blog or Coach Dos’ blog.  These blogs are established and moving them would probably hurt them more than its worth.  However if you’re starting out, get your own domain.

If you have a website for your training business, then you don’t pay any extra for another site, other than a domain name with Godaddy.

4.  Use Wordpress.org for your blog

In conjunction with #3, when you decide on your domain name, you will use Wordpress as your blogging software.  It doesn’t cost anything and is so versatile and customizable.  There really is no comparison to this software.  If you want to know which theme to use, we have one strong recommendation – Thesis. Find out why – Why Thesis Theme is the Only Choice For Your Fitness Blog

5.  Use plugins that provide functionality

The plugin codex over at Wordpress.org is HUGE!  If you get a free theme from somewhere, you can always find a plugin that can pretty much do anything you want. You wanna logon to your blog and have it say hi to you, well go search the codex because its probably there.  Easy Fitness Websites blog is currently running 18 plugins that do various things.  If the theme wasn’t Thesis however, we would need to run many more.

You can get plugins that automatically sends emails (see here) after someone comments on your blog, continually updates your sitemap for better search engine optimization, or allows visitors to bookmark and share your fitness site with other sites..  The list goes on and on.

6.  To get traffic you need content

Have you heard the phrase…content is king?  It is so true and is a big reason why a salespage for your fitness business will rank over anybody else not doing a salespage.  But with your continually updated blog, you have new content everytime you hit “post.”  If every post you make mention of something in your town related to fitness, what is gonna happen when a person searches google for your town?  BAM they find your page.

Zach Hunt is killing this blog model with a blog strictly for his local area and keywords at this fitness blog.  This isn’t even his real blog, this is just a keyword dominating blog.  Yet he shows up for everything from Spokane cabinets to Spokane fishing.  Hows that for Google domination?

You can also use this to help find that content SEO Tricks For Fitness Sites

7. Remove the Wordpress calendar and other standard widgets from your sidebar

These widgets provide no useful benefit to you and just clutter up your sidebar with ugliness.  So remove the tag cloud, blogroll, and other crap.  Make your blog look clean and sexy.

8. Make your blog easy to read

Avoid using dark backgrounds on your blog. Try to use a lighter background and black color for your text. Dark backgrounds make it harder for people to read your blog and stress the eyes.  Make sure your background suits the theme and tone of your blog however.  I don’t think it hurts a site like Ross Enamaits because he is speaking to hardcore male fitness peeps.

9.  In addition, don’t make your font too small.

Choose a nice size that is easy to read and doesn’t cause you to have to adjust your browser size over 100% or move in closer to your monitor.  The font size for Easy Fitness Websites is 14pt Verdana.  An example of a site with font that is too small is Robertson Training Systems and I have mentioned it to him via comment before.

10. Make sure the user/reader knows what your site is about in seconds.

Attention is one the most valuable currencies on the Internet. If a visitor can not figure what your site is about in a couple of seconds, he will probably just go somewhere else. Your site must communicate why I should spend my time there, and FAST!  from Daily Blog Tips

There are many blogs popping up lately from fitness trainers, boot camp instructors, and even some of the fitness design companies that seem to not realize this tactic.  This doesn’t apply to just blogs, your salespages need to be the same as well.  Ask your friends/family to check out your site, without knowing its yours or what its about and ask them to give you feedback.

I’ve landed on a few trainer sites that are nothing more than some images. Now I pay attention to site design and layout, so if I can’t figure out what the hell you want a person to do, how will the average person know?

11. Do not have your homepage as some stupid flash intro.

If people want to come to your site, give them your content, not some flash thing that you think is cool.  When is the last time you actually watched one of these video things?

12. Optimize your image names.

As I mentioned in SEO Tricks For Wordpress Fitness Blogs a good way to get traffic and a small amount of Google love is too optimize your images.  Be sure to include an “alt” and “title” description for them.  This doesn’t apply to just blogs either, be sure to optimize your sales pages as well.

13. Make your blog look BIGGER.

What I mean by that is most users today are using large monitors. Chances are your blog has been designed to fit the old small monitors and so it will look like a teeny-weeny spec on anything that is 19 inches or larger.

The easy way to make your blog look bigger is to increase the size of the post body area (that’s where all your posts go) and your sidebar. Once you have done that you can also increase the font size a little, but don’t go overboard because most modern browsers today already have a feature for making fonts larger. from Blogjoke

Although there are only 13 tips here, this post took quite some time to write.  I went through alot of sites and picked out some of the really useful right out of the box techniques you can implement right now.  Have you found anything in particular that has helped your blog function, look, or perform better?  Please share it with a comment below.