9 Tips To Make Your Blog User-Friendly

Don’t judge a book by its cover? Yeah right! Publishers spend thousands of dollars on cover design. They know that the difference between selling the book and having it languish in obscurity on the bookshelf lies in attracting the consumer’s eye and intriguing them enough to stop what they are doing to pick the book up.

Your blog’s design is the book cover for your writing. You may be a brilliant blogger, the best in the web kingdom, but you are scaring off potentially loyal subjects if your template is visually overpowering, difficult to navigate or just takes too darn long to load.

Here are a few things you can do to help make your blog user friendly.

Get Rid of the Music

You‘re a hard core 80’s music fan. Who wouldn’t be with songs like Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” and Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done for Me Lately”? That doesn’t mean, though, that you should have Queen screaming “Another One Bites the Dust” at your visitors when they come to your site.

I favor not having any music at all but if you just have to have it, be a good netizen and disable the auto start on your music player. At the very least, offer an option, prominently displayed, to turn the music “Off”. Otherwise your visitor may become nothing more than a one hit wonder.

Common Sense Site Navigation

It’s really annoying when I click a link and end up on an orphaned web page with nary a link to any other page in sight. Worse than that is having to deal with confusing, strangely named or symbolic navigation.

Put a navigation menu in a place that is repeated throughout the site such as the header (preferably), sidebar or footer. Keep the menu structure simple and use recognizable names or images for your links. For example, if you have an online store call it “Store” or “Shop”. Don’t call it “Procure” or something equally obnoxious. You may have a vocabulary that’s out of this world but your buyers may not and they’ll thank you for making them feel dumb by giving money to someone who won’t.

Use Vision Friendly Color schemes, Fonts and Font-Sizes

Neon yellow text on a black background is “da’ bomb” and not in a good way. An extreme color combination makes for difficult reading. Equally, using a font color barely darker than the background color turns your blog post into one big blob for the visually impaired. It is best to stick with dark text on pale backgrounds or dark backgrounds with light text. The contrast should be sharp and the colors complementary to each other.

There is an ongoing debate in the design community as to whether font sizes should be set using pixels, ems or percentages. Internet Explorer will not scale fonts sized in pixels whereas using ems or percentages will make the font scalable in all browsers but can produce unpredictable sizes and break the design.

From a usability perspective, it is better to use ems or percentages so people can adjust their browser settings to read what you have written. If you decide to go the pixel route avoid going smaller than 14 pixels as differences in browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions can make the font impossible to read.

You should also use a font that is common to all operating systems, that is evenly spaced and easy to decipher. If necessary use the letter-spacing property in your style sheet to space the letters out so that they are readable.

Get Rid of the Clutter

One of the biggest traps new bloggers get caught up in is the accumulation of web “Stuff”. Awards, tracking meters and flashing graphics that then they use to “MySpace”-ify their template.

Instead of supporting your content, all of these things compete with your writing for attention. On top of that, too many blog gadgets slow down site loading times. Keep only the bare essentials and place everything else on a separate “award” or “links” page and link to it from your navigation menu.

Optimize Images for Quick Loading Times

For the quickest loading times, resize images as small as you can without losing quality. Ideally, your images should be in the 10 kilobytes to 50 kilobyte range which will produce a loading time of about 1 to 10 seconds per image on a 56.6k dialup connection.
Use Photoshop or Gimp to resize images, rather than uploading them and using the height and width properties to make them smaller. This is because the browser still loads the full image and then resizes to your specifications. If you operate a photolog, create thumbnails of your pictures and link them to the larger sizes to improve loading times.

Practice Ad Blending

There is no shame in displaying ads to make money from your website. However don’t make the mistake that countless blogs do and place ads after every other word. I once visited a blog where the entire upper portion of the site was nothing but advertisements forcing me to hunt for the content. Needless to say I couldn’t click away fast enough.

Don’t force people go on a safari to find your content! You will be rewarded with a larger audience, which will net you higher advertising rates, if you make is easy for people to access your content.

Make your pages printer friendly

Sometimes your content is so good that people will want to print it out and save it in a scrapbook of the best blog posts ever. The problem is that when the user hits that print button, instead of outputting a neat and organized article that fits perfectly one sheet of paper, the printer shoots out a hot mess consisting of six fragmented pages of text and graphics.

Take the time to format a style sheet that will make your web pages play nice with the printer. Your visitors will love you for it and you’ll look like a genius compared to the other websites that don’t. For more information how to do this, check out Eric Meyer’s article “Print Different” .

Write for the Web

Due to the influence of television, people’s attention span is not what it used to be. And because the computer monitor resembles a television screen, that attention deficient gets transferred online.

The optimal length for posts is about 750-1000 words. Use short paragraphs followed by a reasonable amount of white space to help combat reader fatigue. Consider breaking up longer posts into a series. This will help your search engine rankings because there will be more content to rank for and your traffic because people will revisit to finish what they started.

Make sure it works in all browsers

Though Firefox is clearly the superior browser on the market, the sad truth is that the majority of people still use Internet Explorer. Even though Internet Explorer fails to conform to web standards, you want to ensure that your users are able to access your site and have the same experience despite the browser they use. This means using XHTML valid code and accounting for browser quirkiness. Failing to do so and favoring one browser over the others is just asking for trouble.

Taking the time to implement these basic suggestions will reward you with happier visitors and a site that stands out from the crowd.

Thank the editor. Buy me a coffee!