One of the biggest mistakes we’ve seen bloggers make is having a blog with good content but horrible usability. Usability is the way your blog is designed to allow readers to figure out what your blog is about, what kind of content you have, where your best posts are, how to find out more about you, how to subscribe, and so on.
The reader might come to your blog and find interesting content, but not find much more if the things he wants to do are difficult to find. Make it difficult, and he’ll soon leave. Make it easy to find important information, and he just might stick around and subscribe.
Usability is a conversation between you and your reader.
Think of this conversation as questions the reader asks when he or she first comes to your blog. Usability is about what answers you give the reader. And about how you give these answers.
So, what questions do we tend to ask when we see a blog for the first time? I’ve listed some of the important questions each blog needs to answer.
There are two ways a reader should instantly find out what your blog is about: the blog title and the tagline together should be a clear indication of the direction of the blog.
Here are three examples:
Flavorwire.com: Cultural news and critique
Goodlife ZEN: Practical inspiration. For a happier life
Write to Done: Unmissable articles on writing
You can see that in each case it’s pretty clear what the blog is about. How about your own blog? Are you clear on what your blog is about? If you’re not clear, your readers will be confused too.
It can be a long process to get to a clear tagline and you may find that the tagline evolves over time.
Not just what topics the blog is about, but how good the articles are, and what the writing is like. What do you do when you find a new blog that might be interesting? Personally, I read a few paragraphs of the newest post (or the whole post if it’s riveting). If I like it, I’ll want to see what else this blogger offers. But I’m not going to spend much time digging for posts.
It’s important to keep your best writing on show.
Why? Well, imagine for a moment that you have just opened a clothes shop. The first customers are coming in and want to look at what you offer – and maybe buy something.
But your shop has a peculiar design. All your clothes are packed away in cupboards. A customer asks you, “What kind of shirts do you have?”
“They’re in the top cupboard. Just grab the ladder, climb up, unlock the cupboard, dig about in the stack of shirts and see if there’s one you like.”
You probably wouldn’t make too many sales if you had that kind of shop.
Now, if your competitor across the road has also newly opened a clothes shop, but has put all the clothing on racks that people can reach – they would attract a lot more customers, wouldn’t they? And a shop that puts their very best pieces in the window would do best of all.
It’s the same with a blog. We need to make it as easy as possible for visitors to select and read articles. Even more important, you want to present your best stuff for visitors, right?
A great way to present your best stuff to new readers is to have a link to ‘favorite posts’ in the sidebar. If you have your best posts on show, chances are that visitors will read them.
If you’re thinking of stopping by regularly, you want to know who is behind the blog. So an important question your readers ask is, who are you? What’s your background? Why should I follow you? These are questions that you can answer directly on your ABOUT page, but that should also become clear through the way you write your posts.
An important consideration is that people want to see you. They want to connect to a real person. Do you show your photo on your ABOUT page?
Social proof is important. People tend to believe that if a blog is popular, it must be doing something right. And often this is true — it’s a sign that a blog is connecting with readers and providing really useful or interesting content, and that readers find a lot of value in the blog.
Signs of a popular blog are the number of subscribers and comments it has. Once you have a four figure subscriber count, it’s time to show it off.
As I said before, it’s good to showcase your most popular posts — or the ones you think are most important. These are the “core” or fundamental posts on your blog, ones that will explain what the blog is about, what your key philosophies are, and why they should keep reading the blog. Make sure your new readers can’t miss them.
You might also consider creating a ‘Start Here’ page that suggests to new readers where to go on your blog.
Readers like to be able to contact their favorite blogger. It makes the blogger seem more available and accessible. It’s important to make contact easy. A common solution is the contact form, which can easily be done with a number of WordPress plugins.Do you have a contact form on your blog? Do you have a ‘Contact’ page?
In general, readers prefer to email you, instead of filling out an impersonal form. If you publish your email address directly on your blog, it may be harvested by spam bots. An easy way around this problem is to publish your email address as an image. Only humans can read the words on an image!
One of the most important aspects of usability is to create a useful navigation system. It’s a good idea to have a navigation bar under your header. Make sure you set up important links in your navigation bar. For example, links like Home, About, and Contact. You might also want to link to money-making pages like Resources, where you can list affiliate products.
The sidebar is also a good place for fine-grained navigation. For example, a list of your most popular posts and your recent posts helps readers get a sense of what’s on offer on your blog. You can also link to products you have created.
Remember when you last joined a club? Maybe you went to a club event to check it out. One of the things that we want to know before we join is whether members are friendly and supportive, or whether they tend to be aloof. How do they treat each other? What’s the club culture like?
It’s the same when new readers arrive at your blog. They want to know whether there is a sense of community and whether they can feel at home there.
Ok, so the new reader has checked you out. And now they’ve made a decision to subscribe. If they have to search around to find how to subscribe, they may well change their mind.
Can they subscribe easily by email and by RSS? The subscription options should be well placed and very visible — don’t make the reader search all over for a way to subscribe, or she’ll give up and leave.
If you make the answers to these questions readily available, your new readers will be more inclined to subscribe. It’s not the only factor in getting someone to subscribe — the quality and usefulness of the content is the No. 1 factor — but usability can drive readers away from an otherwise excellent blog.
Please note that not everything mentioned above needs to be done on every blog, but if you go against the general advice above, it should be done consciously and with very good reason.
Author: Leo Babauta