 Blog usability mistakes
Friday, 26 May 2006
Since they first appeared on the scene towards the end of the last century, blogs have emerged as one of the most effective and popular means of communication. So much so, that lots and lots of businesses use them as a means of establishing and maintaining their reputation or brand.
Jakob Nielsen’s article “The top ten webblog design mistakes” from a few months ago has however concluded that blogs are essentially:
“often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author”
The major problems still prevalent are:
- Nondescript posting titles
- No author biographies
- No author photo
- Links don’t say where they go
- Classic hits are buried
- Mixing topics
- Forgetting that you write for your future boss
- Having a domain name owned by a weblog service
- The calendar is the only navigation
- Irregular publishing frequency
While some of these mistakes can be blamed on the publishing platform, they mostly revolve around the authors and the content managers themselves. A good quality CMS, such as the one we use, ensures that our website is aesthetically pleasing and complies with web standards and common-sense usability guidelines, leaving us to focus on producing (hopefully) decent content.
As far as we’re concerned, our website meets all of Jakob’s criteria with one possible exception. Can you tell which one?
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