Top 10 Usability Mistakes for Blogs - How Does Yours Rate?
The prolific usability guru Jacob Nielsen has a handy post called "
Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes" and last night I thought I'd scope them out and see if I needed to make any changes to this site (thanks
Joanna).
The summary is bang on:
"Blogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author."
This site came out of my feeling that my 'corporate blog' on the
3form site (the blog is no longer active - I'll turn it off soon) wasn't the right place for me to put my personal opinions online. And I've not really put any time into designing this thing - just incrementally chipping away at the layout, adding
widgets, improving things here and there, etc. It doesn't even validate properly because of the variety of plugins I'm using and various Wordpress 'features'.
But if I can at least tick off Jacob's Top Ten then I'm getting somewhere.
So here we go:
1. No Author Biographies
I've had a
biog for a while - in fact I've separated it into a few different pages and linked to my
LinkedIn profile.
Check.
2. No Author Photo
With
Emily around I'm not short of these, but I thought it might be nice to have a photo of me on the page. After all with a name like 'Stef' it can get a bit ambiguous on the whole gender issue.
Check.
3. Nondescript Posting Titles
I'm always careful to make my titles and first line of my posts relatively useful to people. Although I think I need to de-ramble my posts sometimes.
Check (ish)
4. Links Don't Say Where They Go
I definitely don't use 'click here' or 'here' type links, but perhaps I'm a little bit lax on using the Title attribute when adding links.
Check (ish, from now on)
5. Classic Hits are Buried
Hiding your light under a bushel in other words - not showing anywhere what are your most popular posts. I'm thinking about installing some kind of 'popularity' plug-in. For now, I've added the
Most Commented widget to my sidebar. It might even be worthwhile putting a 'related posts' list on each post page.
Not check - more work required.
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
Looking at my stats most people seem to come in via direct links to pages or from the home page and don't seem to use the 'past posts' listings. Maybe I need to look at adding a few other ways to find things now I actually have some content - including using tagging and categories in a better way. Whodathunkit - I actually lasted more than 3 months!
Not check - more work required.
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
Yeah - I'm busy and quite often can't post what I'm actually thinking about because of client privacy issues and commercial reasons. So it's once every few days. But I think that just posting every day because you should do isn't such a great thing. If I don't have something relevant I don't post!
Check? What do you think?
8. Mixing Topics
Hmm. Not sure about this one either. I do write _a lot_ but when I do it's on topic, even if it's 'this is an update of what happened this weekend'.
Check (I think).
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
I'm well aware of that one. Google seems to like me (I'm on the front page just for the search term '
stef') and you can pretty much find out everything I've ever published because of my unusual surname. So I'm always careful not to flame, not to swear, not to post embarassing content about myself, and so on. I did a talk about this at Content Lab a couple of years ago and said that within a couple of years we will see the first suicide because of viral personal reputation destruction based on a 'star wars kid' style video with even more embarassing content - perhaps someone in a very public position...?
Check.
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
Nah. That's one of the reasons I wrote my post on
how to set up a professional blog in 4 hours. I know a few people who just don't know how to do this, or how to migrate their site content across even if they had the domain. That's a problem. Anyway.
Check.
Overall - not bad, perhaps 7 out of 10?
Some room for improvement and I think I should definitely look at doing a redesign at some point!
How does yours rate?