Blogging to Fame!

Apart from focusing on content as we discussed earlier, one of the most important things is User Experience on your blog. As soon as a site is called a blog one usually forgets the user centered design requirements. If you keep track of little things it can enhance your reader experience greatly.

You may question how many readers actually bother about where links are placed and what kind of navigation do you have in your blog. What gets noticed is not the presence but the lack of it.

Reduce Sidebar Clutter- Place the widgets, only which are important to your blog and are serving a purpose. Think innovatively while placing ads, don’t overdo them in your sidebar. Latest blog design trends are putting archives and other navigational links at the bottom of the page to unclutter the sidebar( I personally do not like to scroll down as far to browse categories, and find other posts). So it is important to offer your reader a way to navigate through the blog from a place that is as important as sidebar.

Blog Width- Building your blog to a set width and satisfying all your users isn’t the possibility. A number of other solutions exist, with the most popular being the liquid layout. It expands based on the size of the browser window. Ideally, this means that everyone will view the webpage at the largest possible width.

Though the drawback is with very large or very small resolutions, the design can become very haphazard. The length of line will either become too long or all the content will be squashed into a very small space.

The best way to deal with this will be to set the maximum and minimum length of the content.

Links- First of all, links should always look like links. Don’t make it hard for your readers to find out where to click. This is the least thing they will want to put their brains into.

Now to answer should the links be opening in new windows or not- people have different opinions about it. To do or not to do depends your individual thinking.

The right view-

Users browsing your content will right click and make the link open in a new tab(as I like it) or a new window. Forcing multiple windows won’t make your blog sticky. Rather try to get people back to your blog by making the content more engaging and hard to live without.

The Left View-

Keeping Blog readers on your page and not loosing them to an external link can be one of them. Sometimes its hard for readers to remember how they got to particular webpage, and have to click the BACK button a zillion times to find the navigational source, they would just ignore and move ahead.

It is also distracting for your reader to navigate away in the middle of the article.

The Libran view(My view)-

As a browser I find it too hard to manage a hundred windows all at one time when I am trying to do a five hundred things at one time. So I prefer links opening in tabs.

As a blogger I would suggest to go an extra mile to make it easier for your readers by providing links to PDF files and large images to open in different window. Also if you have some external links in the middle of the article let it open in a new window.

Rest can be left on users choice of opening the links as per their requirement.

I would love to listen to your point here.

Enjoy Blogging,

Divya

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Labels: Blog Design

Is it a new algorithm or is Google playing a new game? I have nothing to blame, as our blog goes from Page Rank 4 to Page Rank 5. But many authority sites like Search Engine Journal, WashingtonPost, Forbes got a shock on 24th October.

Others that face the same plight includes problogger.net, copyblogger, engadget and many more. With such an outcome should A-List bloggers be forced to worry about their position on internet? In my earlier posts, I had written about page rank not being the criteria to judge the trust of a search engine on a site. The sites suffering from lowering of page rank have seen increase of traffic sent to them through search engines. The line between Page Rank and the quality of sites is very thin.

For people who think Page Rank is the end of it all better tune themselves to a wider perspective of search engines and Google. Getting paid links for your site will no longer pay back. PageRank has undergone a lot of change since first published. As suggested the algorithm might now be addressing the growth of internet.

So some google algorithm ranks the quality of your blog- not your readers/subscribers and your fans. With all the frenzy of what happened last week due to Google Dance and the new assigned authority(read page rank), Google still seems to boss around the blogs/sites and their quality. Stop worrying about what google thinks of you, instead go ahead and do everything to make your blog a better place for your readers.

Labels: Better Blogging