pelf-ism is contagious

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.:

1. Non-interference. Can your readers click through your content without distracting pop-ups, blinking objects or other things that get in the way?
2. How many clicks? Anything that requires more than 3 clicks will make your readers click away.
3. Think text, not pictures. Add images and multimedia as accessories to your blog content, not replacements.
4. Posts linked together. Do you have a “Previous” and “Next” post links on every post?
5. Home: If your readers get confused, can they easily return “home”?
6. Choose a commonly available web font, a font size that is easy to read, and use font size and colour changes sparingly.
7. Write short paragraphs instead of long chunks of unbroken text.
8. Make sure your blog meets the web standards and pass a range of validation tests in accordance with the W3.org web standards.
9. Allow access to the disabled, blind or visually-impaired.
10. All images should be labeled with the ALT attribute to describe the image.
11. 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

Lorelle also mentions in her book that an ideal blog design is one that:

1. loads in less than 10 seconds.
2. never requires scrolling left or right or resizing the window.
3. limits up and down scrolling.
4. contains easy-to-find navigation.
5. 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 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?

In one of my recent posts, To blogroll or not to blogroll, I talked about why I add my favourite blogs in my blogroll and how I personally prefer picking up RSS feeds these days compared to the conventional way because it’s soo much easier!

Zewt @ As Zewt As It Gets said that he had had people asking him to exchange links. Aiya, too bad la, you’re just so popular that people can’t help but ask to exchange links with you! (The following conversation has been edited)

“I got people asking me, can we exchange links? Sometimes, I don’t really know how to answer them.”

“You know what Lilian @ 5xmom says?? Go play elsewhere!”

“They asked me face to face!!?? Then how? Wouldn’t wanna be so arrogant right?”

“Err.. Yeah, you can’t be too rude and straight-forward, hor.. I know, pretend you didn’t hear it.”

“Cannot la. Too much.”

“Like this cannot, like that cannot, then you write a post and put all links there la, OK?”

“I don’t think I want to pretend I didn’t hear it and walk away. That’s very rude.”

“Aww.. Of course I didn’t mean it in a practical way! And if that happens (to me), I’d have to smile and say, Oh yes? Yeah, I think so, perhaps you’d write me your blog URL and I’d link you as soon as I got home!”

“And after you’ve said it, do you link them in the end?”

“Of course! If I said I would, I would. That’s why it’s important to do some link-housekeeping once in a while.. Otherwise the link list gets longer and longer each day.. But then again, I’m more into RSS feeds these days instead of links. The links in my blogrolls don’t really mean anything to me, but my list of subscribed blogs in my Bloglines, yes, I read them all.”

So how would you react if somebody walks up to you and requests for a link exchange? Frankly speaking, nobody ever asked me to exchange links with them, which means that I am not popular enough But if somebody confronts me and requests for a link exchange, that’s what I’d probably say, and do. Moreover, it doesn’t matter much to me whether you’re in my blogroll or not because it isn’t something I put a lot of attention into, hhehe

But if you’d like to introduce your blog to me, you are most welcome to do so. Just drop them in the comment box, and I’d drop by Like I mentioned not too long ago, it only takes a few grammatically-correct sentences to entice me into subscribing to your blog, and I will remain subscribed until one of these things takes place.

By the way, in case I didn’t state this clearly, the question here is, how would YOU respond if somebody walks up to you on the street, and requests for a link exchange? Would you tell him on his face that, “No, I’m sorry I won’t link you because your blog is full of ads”?? Or would you say, “Sure, I would” but forget about it the moment the guy turns his back?? What would you say?

If you’ve visited my Blogrolls page, you would have noticed that I use a Blogrolling script which tells me which blogs have been updated in the last 12 hours and not surprisingly, only Skeet’s and Daniel’s blogs are indicated as “updated” all the time.

That is because many of us do not ping Blogrolling.

So girls and boys, if you’re using WordPress, you may want to set your blog to ping Blogrolling so that your blog is marked as “updated” every time you publish a new post (unless you don’t want anybody to know that you’ve just updated your blog).

To ping Blogrolling, follow these 3-simple-steps (for WordPress-powered blogs only):

1. Go to your Dashboard > Options > Writing
2. Under Update Services, add this line of URL into the box: http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
3. Click Update Options to save the changes.

And you’re done!