Blog user interfaces
Over on A World of Bytes, I’ve started highlighting interesting tech blogs people might enjoy. However, I chided each of my first three selections for UI failings. A comment thread quickly ensued, and social media maven Jeremiah Owyang asked how he could make his blog easier to read. This post is a followup to that discussion.
Jeremiah’s blog and my most active ones – DBMS2 and Text Technologies – have a lot in common. Specifically, they are multi-hundred-page websites, featuring dense material meant to be read by busy, tech-savvy people. And so my core advice boils down to: Make it as easy as possible for people to find and recognize what is interesting to them.
In particular, I suggest:
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Your home page, category pages, and so on should have many visible posts each. To effect this, make your post excerpts short. It’s better to show the reader many title + short excerpt combos than one long post; that way, there’s much more chance he will notice one or more posts that seem intriguing.
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Take every opportunity to offer additional posts to your readers. For example, I give “recent posts” pride of place atop one of the sidebars. And I link to other of my posts whenever it seems to make sense, as in my posts on MapReduce and database diversity.
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Use your category pages. There’s controversy as to whether blog category pages are good or bad for search engine optimization (SEO). The naysayers worry about “duplicate content,” while the fans point out how on-topic a category page can be. But leaving SEO aside — for human users category pages are surely good things See, for example, my category pages for data warehouse appliances, DATAllegro, or Twitter. (If you prefer tag clouds to category hierarchies – or want to use both – that’s fine too.)
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Having good search is obviously important. It’s hard to get, however, which is one reason search not a substitute for category pages on the like. (But stay tuned for what I hope will be very exciting news in that area.)
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Make your post titles highly visible. The more that post titles catch the site visitor’s eye, the more chance she has to be intrigued by them. There are many ways to achieve this goal graphically, of course. My blogs, for example, use a bold font and a strong-looking separator bar atop each post.
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There should be a maximum length to your posts. If you don’t think that your interested readers will make it all the way to the end, break your posts up. (Most of the time, at least; one of the joys of the blog format is that there are no absolutely space limits.)
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Especially in long posts, use visual cues to highlight important points. That’s what I’m doing with all the boldface in this post. Help people skim your posts rather than reading them word-for-word, if that’s what they want to do. They – and you – should be able to get much of the benefit of a full reading that way, at a fraction of the total time investment.
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Leave space to be promotional. Your blog has objectives. Whatever those are, you probably should spare some sidebar space to advance them directly. With multiple blogs, I use some of my most prime space to encourage readers to visit the other ones too (you probably don’t have the same need), and to sign up for my integrated feed (you too should devote high-quality space to “asking for the subscription”). I also make room to promote most of my service offerings. If nothing else, you should at least provide a visible link to your company’s website! It’s amazing how many high-quality, commercially-oriented blogs omit that very basic feature.
I could go on at great length, listing important possibilities that did not make the cut on my screen real estate, but might be worth it for you (starting with ads!!). Or I could highlight subtleties, like the just-for-me invisible log-in button my web designer Melissa Bradshaw gave me (just to the right of “Subscribe!”). But this has gotten long enough for a single post. 🙂 And so I’ll close with a question:
Which aspects of my blog interfaces do or don’t work particularly well for you?
Feedback would be most helpful.
Comments
5 Responses to “Blog user interfaces”
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[…] and gave me some feedback when I asked how I can improve, (read comments) then extended it to his own personal blog with practical recommendations. He gives me and other bloggers some food for thought on effective blog design for […]
Hi Curt,
As a reader of your blog, I didn’t even know (or at least didn’t remember) what your blog looked like until I came here to write this comment. Consuming a blog through an RSS reader makes many of the issues you’ve identified less important or irrelevant (category pages, good search, many posts visible etc.).
Of course, you have to get people to subscribe to your feed, and I guess that’s where your comments can help. It also depends on the nature of your audience as to the significance of RSS readers as a delivery channel.
Cheers,
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
I wouldn’t disagree with any of that.
Thanks,
CAM
Hate excerpts — I like coming back to Jeremiahs every week or two and scrolling through everything like scanning through the newspaper. If he excerpted everything, I would read 1 in 10 posts.
As always, it depends (on your content, your audience, and their use patterns).
John,
There’s one in every crowd. 🙂
Actually, given the size of Jeremiah’s readership, in his case there probably are a LOT in every crowd …
Best,
CAM