Thou shalt provide a good user experience on your blog

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Thou shalt not use tag clouds. They’re so 2008, no matter how cool you think they look.
  3. Thou shalt not use red. Especially for a link colour. Red means danger.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.