Well, according to your blog niche you find a template online or hire a designer so he can design according to your needs. However, some of the changes every designer should do; I mean to have new school changes that can increase your blog user experience. In-addition, user-experience (UX) refers to the reaction of a reader to a particular product or service (that is blog in our case). Further, W3C has introduced new versions of CSS as CSS3 and HTML 4.01 to HTML5. From which we can produce some more useful and creative designs. So have a look at those new techniques for better user experience.
Kick sidebar - In Side-panel
Sidebar is being used by almost every blog, but instead those blogs who consider their post content and want to highlight it more, then I can suggest to use side-panel instead of sidebar. So whats the difference between sidebar and side-panel? Actually their is no such difference except that side-panel only appears when it needed. Due to sidebar the post content get less space but when it comes to side-panel, it stay hidden until the toggle button is pressed. So the post content is more highlighted.' Generally, side-panels are popular in responsive designs because sidebar usually goes in end of the page, so designers uses plugins and other solutions that changes sidebar into side-panel in responsive design. Some of the jQuery plugins are present to make side-panels:
jPanelMenu
PageSlide jQuery Plugin
Collapsible jQuery Panel Plugin
Read More: How to make a sliding panel in responsive design using Jquery mobile and Jquery plugin?
Infinite scrolling
Infinite scrolling refers to the unlimited loading of posts without page refresh. There are jQuery plugins present that can load post using client-side, so the problem of servers is never stays an issue. Secondly, user never likes to change the page again and again specially when he really need something. Further it is not recommended by web-masters because this solution is not a browser friendly because it happens that old browsers are unable to load them. Well, I leave implementation on you.For example you can go to mashable.com
AJAX loading
AJAX loading refers to the new page loads without refresh. It is different from infinite scrolling in a way that infinite scroll loads posts when demanded instead AJAX loading is when a user clicks on a link on blog that is internal link of blog then it won't reload the page instead it will load the desire content only with refreshing the page. It seems a bit beautiful and cool when it comes to user-experience. For example you can go to The Next Web. AJAX loading firstly considered as non-friendly SEO solution but now there are ways that AJAX pages are index-able to search engine giants like Google. I won't go in detail, SearchEngineLand described it well how to make AJAX content search engine friendly.
Say hello to Responsive Design
Responsive design is now possible by new CSS3 media queries through which we can create design that are responsive for small screen sizes. Every successful blogger want their mobile or tablet readers to see a customized and pretty blog as they look in and experience in Desktop or any large screen size. Secondly, according to a survey 75% mobile users never reads on the blogs that are not responsive for their screen sizes. Beside all these benefits responsive design never kills ads, Google Adsense also provides responsive ad units that load different ad size in different screen sizes, also you can customize them manually (if only you know how to code CSS3).
Enhanced Typography
I just get amazed to see that a large number of blogs never focuses a eye-catching typography. I still remember when first Mac (OS) was launched by Apple, its typography was designed enough attractive that Microsoft copied that. If these giants are considering and concerned about typography then why shouldn't we? The ways a designer can integrate good fonts is either to host your own fonts or you can try Google fonts (recommended). Google fonts is an open source and free way to use your fonts in either commercial or personal projects. Further let me clear that using of too many or heavy loading fonts can result in page loading time, so make sure that you do not use to many fonts.