Jakob Nielsen: Top 10 Blogging Mistakes
Earlier this month usability guru Jakob Nielsen posted a very
readable alertbox article on Weblog Usability:
The Top 10 Design Mistakes. Do you commit any of these sins? I
do....here's my personal scorecard:
- No Author Biography: Ooops. I have one; I'll post soon and build it into the nav.
- No Author Photo: I guess I rate OK on this; there's one in the page header, though not it's not that great. I'm been meaning to come up with something a little more fun, but who has time? I'm putting this on my Thanksgiving weekend to do list.
- Nondescript Posting Titles:
I think I'm good at writing titles, having come originally from a
journalism background and also having watched scores of hours of
usability tests during which users got confused by confusing labels and
headlines.
- Links Don't Say Where They Go: This is one of my pet peeves, too: As Jakob says succinctly "life is too short to click on an unknown." See my previous posting on the evils of 'click here'. But, I should probably use more title tags to indicated destinations.
- Classic Hits are Buried: Ooops. We don't have a great mechanism for navigating to classic hits.
- The Calendar is the Only Navigation: Related to above.
- Irregular Publishing Frequency:
Yeah, but we all have day jobs that take priority. I try to post once a
week or so.
- Mixing Topics: Guilty. Of course, that's the charm of personal blogs: I can blog about brussels sprouts or snow or candy corn or Murrow as well as design and usability.
- Forgetting that Your Write for the Future Boss: Ooops.
- Having a Domain Owned by a
Weblog Service: The cool thing about being at Sun is that you
have "sun.com" in your blog URL :-)
Good advice, as always, from the master.
Tunes: Sinatra: Witchcraft
