I’ve crafted what I feel is a much more sophisticated and easier to use WordPress theme for my blog to demonstrate my skills and the thinking that goes into a theme. On July 11, 2005, Catalyst Group Design released the results of a somewhat small study they did that generated a lot of buzz in the blogosphere. Called Net Rage: A Study of Blogs and Usability, it found that many people didn’t know a blog when they saw one, had trouble navigating blogs, and had absolutely no idea what some blog components were, such as categories or RSS. Many people failed to grasp the purpose or the exact functioning of comments.
One of the more enlightening bits of feedback given in the report was that users seemed not to know the difference between a blog and a “normal” website, and couldn’t tell they were on a blog. When they were informed they were indeed looking at a blog, some of the participants expressed anger that the blog didn’t identify itself as such. For those of us who practically live in the thick, steamy air of the blogosphere and are quite used to the ways of blogs, it’s easy for us to forget how strange, foreign, and intimidating all this can be to another person. And we must not forget. We must help the adoption process along as best we can. I think those that do so will be in a better position to garner more business. Really, when you think about it, it’s just good customer service and good communications.
To someone starting or running a business, talking about blogs can sound like frightening technical gobbledygook. RSS, pings, trackbacks, tags, and so forth, mean absolutely nothing to most people. And yet, many in business have a vague awareness that the web matters a great deal and they want to take advantage of it. But they want to do it without getting taken advantage of. Spewing internet acronym alphabet soup at someone puts them on their guard and turns them off to your pitch. When I speak with people about blogging, I’m careful never to throw jargon at them relentlessly. But most people understand the idea of coming out on top in searches, so when I tell them that blogs help with that because they’re writing posts full of the words people are using to search, they understand. More importantly, they understand why it’s important.
But blog design itself leaves much to be desired. That’s why I’ve redesigned my WordPress theme to be more friendly to blog novices. Since my job and my goal is to create blogs for people and help them do better at blogging, beginners are my primary target audience (though I seem to be getting more and more visits from other blogging professionals). For this reason, I’ve introduced the following elements into my WordPress theme:
- Clear identification this site is a blog, right at the top of the main content area of the home page.
- Clear, easy to read navigation in the sidebar.
- larger, clear type. As monitors get larger and our population ages, people will appreciate larger type that’s easier to read.
- Concise explanations of what categories are in plain English in the sidebar.
- A link to an explanation of what RSS is in plain English and what it’s for in the sidebar.
- Additional home link on single post pages to make navigation easier.
- Explanation of how the comments work and what my comment policy is, so people know what to expect and what’s expected of them.
- Avoidance of technical terms like trackback, ping, or even permalink. Instead, I use the phrase permanent web address.
Technorati Tags: blog design, theme desging, wordpress theme, blog usability, usability
You might also start talking about “feeds” instead of “RSS”. I think people will better understand what we are talking about if we just use that simple word.
i get the following error when i try to subscribe to the comments on this post:
XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Location: http://www.remarkablogger.com/2005/08/01/make-your-blog-easier-to-use/feed/
Line Number 5, Column 50:
Seth,
All fixed. Apparently, it doesn’t like special character entities that beign with an ampersand, like em dash, in post titles so I took it out. Thanks for pointing this out.
Is there anything special that needs to be done to offer a trackback url? Also, what are the ethics of trackbacks? If I’m reading a post about something you wrote, and I have a similar post, is generally acceptable to go and plug your trackback url into my article?
Desty, usually trackbacks are automatically created when you link to a post on another blog. If you use WordPress, you will see in the Discussion options a checkbox for notifying other blogs. When this is checked, then trackbacks will appear in the trackback/comments for the blog whose post you linked to.
Since we often refer our readers to our own previous posts, we wind up creating trackbacks to ourselves, which, if you use a recent comments/trackbacks plugin, can be unsightly. It makes it look like you’re just blogging to yourself! You need to change the settings to ignore your self-trackbacks or otherwise delete them.