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This site came out of my feeling that my ‘corporate blog’ on the 3form site (the blog is no longer active - I’ll turn it off soon) wasn’t the right place for me to put my personal opinions online.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?
6 Comments
I would debate that displaying related posts is actually more useful (on a posts permalink) than displaying popular posts.
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!
Yep. I agree. Next on the list is to find a ‘related posts’ plugin that works with my version of Wordpress… In terms of usability should it be placed above or below comments? Hmm.
And here it is:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin/
Stef, I am pleased to hear you read Jakob Nielsens’ blog too, as I mentioned in a recent post I take on board and am influenced by a lot of what he mentions on writing for the web and to me he is the authority on the subject.
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!
Brilliant article. I really respect the way that you haven’t simply papered over the cracks and said “yeah, 10 out of 10″; I think that’s very tempting.
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!
is not the list of tags at the end of each post the best related posts link, apart from any one might hand code into the body of the post itself?
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…)