Weblog Usability
Posted on October 26, 2005
Jakob Nielsen is referred to as the king of usability and also the guru of webpage usability and he has written some things that are worth reviewing. Granted, I’m not the only one to link to this, but it does seem relevant enough to the blogosphere that it’s not going to hurt for me to highlight these things, as well.
Dr. Nielsen offers 10 usability problems that many blogs are guilty of and here is his opening:
To reach new readers and respect your existing readers’ time constraints, test your weblog against the following usability problems.
Here are the 10 points:
- No author biographies
- No author photo
- Nondescript posting titles
- Links don’t say where they go
- Classic hits are buried
- The calendar is the only navigation
- Irregular publishing frequency
- Mixing topics
- Forgetting that you write for your future boss
- Having a domain name owned by a weblog service
For myself, I am guilty of more than one of these, but it does help to have some definite guidelines. Honestly, when I started this blog, I was anonymous. My intention was not to make a name for myself, it was to discuss technology in the church. However, over time, I have become less anonymous and that is a good thing. I have learned over the last year that readers want to know who is behind the writing and that is my feeling when I read blogs.
I don’t have a photo posted, that has never seemed relevant to me, but it is interesting to see what the person behind the blog looks like. Maybe I need to post my pic, what do you think?
I’m definitely guilty of using links that don’t say where they go, until now.
I do need to highlight the posts that seem to draw the most attention, that’s something to get done, there are some definite topics that get way more hits than others. Plus I appreciate when other blogs do that.
I don’t post consistently at all, I wish I did, still working on that one.
As far as writing for my future boss, that’s a possibility, I guess, but not that I’m aware of. That’s the point of the statement though and there are far more people that read this than I ever imagined.
Having an actual domain name for your blog is nice, but I don’t think less of a blog if they are hosted by blogger or whatever. It was important to me to get my own domain, once I figured out that this is something I wanted to keep doing.
By the way, this blog turned one year old on October 23. wooooohoooo A year ago is when I started at blogger and it was about 5 or 6 months later that I moved to this domain.
The only thing I would add to the list is to make it easy to contact you. There may be times when someone wants to contact you for a variety of reasons. I get several e-mails per month, not counting spam, directly thru this blog. Plus if you consider that your future employer is reading, you want them to be able to contact you easily, right?
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