Want to make sure your blog isn’t just designed pretty, but also functions well?
I recently wrote a guest post for fellow Nonprofit Millennial blogger Rosetta Thurman‘s Blogging for Branding site on user experience.
I did it 10 commandments style, and here are some of my favourites:
- Thou shalt not include every possible badge and cute widget in your sidebar. Avoid SOS (sidebar overload syndrome) by only keeping what adds value or increases readership.
- Thou shalt not use tag clouds. They’re so 2008, no matter how cool you think they look.
- Thou shalt not use red. Especially for a link colour. Red means danger.
- Thou shalt not use Flash-based technologies. Some may want to spite Steve Jobs and use it anyways, but it’s not accessible for iPhone/iPad users, nor those with visual impairments. Just don’t. As cool as you can make things look with it.
- Thou shalt not over-code, nor over-widget, nor over-plugin. The extra code slows down your site, and as fast as internet may be these days, you don’t want to lose a potential reader before they even get a chance to read anything.
Read all 20 commandments on Blogging for Branding.
Credit: These commandments have been extracted from a kick-ass blog user experience presentation by Peter Drucker to the Vancouver WordPress Meetup. You can view the full slide share here.