Guest post by Jayson Jones

Of the many blogs that pop into existence (at the rate, in fact, of one blog per second), the vast majority are a form of “personal space.” These intentionally personal blogs are a sort of online journal, more about having a sense of territory than of really developing a following. However, for those who care about having a truly successful blog, the focus must shift to accommodate one group, and one group only: the users.

There are plenty of things you can do to make your site better for visitors; you can get an online web design degree, look up everything you can find on successful blog designing, or better yet follow these five simple tips that will help improve user experience on your blog.

1. Streamline Everything

On most blogs, there are links, pictures, design elements, advertisements, and just about everything else you could imagine, all littering the site haphazardly. Not only is this unattractive, but it’s nearly impossible to navigate through. Continue reading

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Websites have been around for so long, we imagine everyone has gotten the hang of the basic rules of usability. But apparently they didn’t! So here are three important things you should consider if you care about your visitors at all. And you should care, especially if you’re selling something through your website.

1. Stop making the www compulsory! People are lazy. They will always prefer to type name.com instead of www.name.com. Yes, most websites respect this rule, but there are still some parts of the Internet where people like to pretend it ain’t that important. It is! People will think your site is down first, then consider other possibilities, like needing to type three more letters.

2. Your site should at least work on major browsers! That’s IE and Firefox. Don’t believe me? Check your Google analytics or whatever tracking software you’re using. See what browsers your visitors are using. And make sure your site works on the most frequently used ones. If it just works on IE, you’ll let a lot of people down.

3. Don’t make advertising more annoying than it already is! Yes, we have come to ignore most ads. So stop making them extremely annoying by allowing them to impair navigation on your site. If you add a close button to an ad, then it should work, the ad should not open again when I try to click a menu button.

These rules are based on what I find most annoying when browsing online and trying to dig information on websites. What would you add to the list?

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