i’m afraid i’m ambivalent about Jakob Nielson’s authority on the subject - to be honest, i find much of what he has to say to be more based on his own personal opinions rather than on objective fact, and it would be nice if he practiced what he preached himself (I mean, 2008 & he’s still not heard of RSS feeds? General usability of his own site? How about arranging the archive of his own column into a bit more of a usable state than just reverse-date order?). Sometimes I flatly disagree with what he says - for example, his stated antipathy to attractive graphic design, and his insistence that site layouts should all conform to the One True Proscribed Site Layout of header at the top, navbar on the left, content on the right (which again he doesn’t follow himself), and that nobody should ever experiment.

in his defence, at least he does get people to actually think about usability, which we all didn’t do so much of before he started his campaign.

(according to his criteria I think I scored 10/10 on my blog…)

Beside that, a great set of criteria to aspire to. Think I’m running on about 6.5 (.5 because I have half a profile pic!). I used to host my own blog (on my own CMS) but since I got WordPress fever I’ve been hosted with them. Time to either move to some Linux hosting or get my domain hooked up!

Now, should the ‘related posts’ be above or below the comments. In my opinon, usability wise I would place it above the comments leading on to wider reading. Comments are usually expected as the last section on a blog entry and can receive a huge amount of commentary. Take your top commented post so far at 38 replies; If like me, blog readers may read a handful of the comments and then move on, thus not reaching the bottom of the page to read related posts if this is where they were placed.

As for rating, similar, 7/10 (ish). Will work on the improvements!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin/

If the end user has either a) arrived at that post via a SERP or inbound links or b) taken the time to click through from somewhere else in the blog, they obviously have an interest in the topic of the post so showing them related posts is effectively providing them with targeted content, increasing the likelihood of click-through (ergo “discovery”) and giving them a more natural flow through the site.

Just my 2p.

PS. If you can get the flow of the site as smooth as the top of Jakob’s head, you’ll be well away!