As a blogger, one of the thoughts that is always playing at the back of my head is whether the structure and design of my blog represents me or my intent. I am constantly changing and rearranging and developing and improving my blog content and layout in order attract and hold on to readers.
The famous phrase, “content is king” is no doubt true to some extent but there are people who judge a blog by its outlook. I recently wrote 4 reasons why I unsubscribe from a blog and though I do not “discriminate” your blog by the way it looks, it is important to have a clean theme (not cluttered with ads that I am forced to sieve through them to get to the content). Lorelle, in her book and guest blogging stint at Problogger, describes the several first impressions that your blog makes as it struggles to attract and hold on to readers.
But apart from looking pretty and nice and dandy and all things sweet, you should also consider the usability, readability and accessibility of your blog, e.g.:
- Non-interference. Can your readers click through your content without distracting pop-ups, blinking objects or other things that get in the way?
- How many clicks? Anything that requires more than 3 clicks will make your readers click away.
- Think text, not pictures. Add images and multimedia as accessories to your blog content, not replacements.
- Posts linked together. Do you have a “Previous” and “Next” post links on every post?
- Home: If your readers get confused, can they easily return “home”?
- Choose a commonly available web font, a font size that is easy to read, and use font size and colour changes sparingly.
- Write short paragraphs instead of long chunks of unbroken text.
- Make sure your blog meets the web standards and pass a range of validation tests in accordance with the W3.org web standards.
- Allow access to the disabled, blind or visually-impaired.
- All images should be labeled with the ALT attribute to describe the image.
- All links should be labeled with the TITLE attribute to describe the link destination.
I have no idea what validations are and even if there are errors on my blog, I’d have no idea how to fix them. Now I understand why there are so many web consultants emerging like mushrooms after the rain :) They are the people who take care of the messy validation codes for you so that you could channel all your energy into building your blog PR and analyzing your statistics, heheehhe :D
Lorelle also mentions in her book that an ideal blog design is one that:
- loads in less than 10 seconds.
- never requires scrolling left or right or resizing the window.
- limits up and down scrolling.
- contains easy-to-find navigation.
- features design elements in common and familiar locations.
Does my blog load in less than 10 seconds? I understand that my sidebars load before my main content, which is “wrong” on many levels — or so I was told — but I have no idea what to do to them, so I shall leave them as they are at the moment :D And, do you find yourself scrolling too much when accessing my blog? Is it easy to navigate your way around, or is it too cluttered with unnecessary stuff?
Excerpt taken from Lorelle VanFossen’s recently published book, Blogging Tips: What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging. Have you ordered your copy yet?
May I borrow your copy? :D
You’re turning into a blogging guru yourself eh?
Well, validation is good if you can manage it, but having your site display correctly in the major browsers is WAY more important. I know some sites that will validate XHTML and CSS but will look like an awful mess in some browsers. And I know others that display perfectly in every browser but fail validation with 100+ errors.
Incidentally your site does not validate XHTML nor CSS. But does anyone really care? Nope.
Oh, and your sidebars load before your main column because of the way this theme is structured. In the code the sidebars come first, then the main content. This is necessary to allow the sidebars to float over to the right. It’s not a big issue, really, don’t worry about it.
Lorelle is a cool gal, but I disagree with several points on her list. This doesn’t reflect on you though :) I have issues with a lot of what Lorelle writes. Then again, I’m just a random rebel without a clue.
By the way, I LOVE your blog. I’m going to write a post on it shortly.
zewt: Not a blogging guru la, but just wanted to share whatever I’ve learned from reading (not only the book but other blogs about blogging). I am passionate about writing and blogging and learning, so that’s why I’m investing so much time and effort into my blog :D
Ben: Thank you very much for the explanation :) The problem with tech-unsavvy bloggers like myself is that we tend to worry too much about things because we aren’t equipped with the necessary knowledge to differentiate what is good and what is not, what should be cause of concern, and what is not..
Ouh, did I just hear you say you LOVE my blog??! That’s flattering! Thank you!
Yeah, I do like it a lot. I’m glad you asked me to come read your site. I probably wouldn’t have found it otherwise :)
Validation is not necessary, and like Ben G said, it’s better to get your design to look the same in all modern browsers. Nobody cares about validation. Top blogs in Technorati fails the W3C standards validation. So, it doesn’t matter.
Having the content to load first is definitely better than having the sidebar loads first. As reader myself, I would prefer to read the content before going through the clutter in the sidebar IF I happened to have a slow connection. Well, your site is fast, my connection isn’t that slow, so at the moment, having the sidebar to load first isn’t a problem to me, yet :)
Well, when making a sweeping judgment about what matters or not in a web design, you have to answer the question of “who”.
If you are worried about your readers, than a fast loading page is critical. Having the content load first, as GeminiGeek said, is important so the reader can start reading and not wait through the loading of the sidebar.
If you are worried about search engines, those errors in your validation can make or break your inclusion in search engine databases, so that really matters.
For instance, if some HTML error or PHP code error in your design causes a search engine web crawler to be rerouted or stopped, it will go looking elsewhere since it can’t go farther. If you have next and previous links, and categories and tag links beyond that point, you’ve lost a chance for the pages within those links to get indexed.
According to Google’s algorithm patents, error-free code counts.
In reality, few web designs are totally error free. A majority of the errors are related to javascript, ads, and just innocuous bad code. These things won’t make or break a search engine’s path through your code, but you may want to fix these anyway.
And if it’s important to you to have your blog meet web standards and be the best it should be, then everything matters and you will want to fix all that you can so everyone is pleased, no matter who comes to visit.
As for not agreeing with me, hell, some days I barely agree with myself. :D
I rarely agree with myself as well, Lorelle :) I find it ironic that on one hand I say “validation doesn’t really matter” and I just spent 5 hours getting my own site to validate. Then again, I freelance as a web designer so having my own site use clean code is very important. I’d definitely agree that clean code will help with search engines, etc. Still, I mean, clean code won’t get you famous, your content will. Like you say, perfectly clean code won’t hurt, but dirty code won’t kill you unless you’ve got some extremely fatal errors in there, which, I’m sure many sites do have. So I think you and I both are right on this one ;)
Dang! How did I click that submit button by accident? I mean, it’s all the way down there ↓. Anyway, I agree with you about the fast loading page as well as the content loading before the sidebar. Also, while we’re on the topic, you may have mentioned this in your book but I can’t be sure as I haven’t read it yet; but the order the content appears on your site matters to search engines too (as I’m sure you’re well aware of). So on sites where the sidebar loads first and then the content, Google could have a tendency to place more importance on it rather than the content.
WOW.. For a while, I thought I had mentioned something I shouldn’t have, and have caused a debate between two bloggers whom I look up to! :D
OK, there’s just sooo much to learn about blogging and the more technical sides of it (validation and all) I’m glad I’ve met you guys, Lorelle and Ben :)
no no no :D I love Lorelle. We disagree on some things but that’s fine, that’s what makes blogging interesting. I think she’s a terriffic person and after watching her speeches at WordCamp it’s almost disturbing how similar we are when we talk about something we’re passionate about. Of course, now I’m just brown-nosing so I’ll stop.
Thanks for the compliment though :) It always makes me blush when someone says they look up to me.