Saturday, August 2, 2008

Four Common Blogging Blunders

Career Center - by Carie Bishop

If you’re into new media as a writer, graphic artist, or developer, Web 2.0 will course through your veins. You’ll probably want your own blog or, perhaps, will be called upon to design or moderate one for someone else. There are plenty of stand-alone platforms in the blogosphere, but it’s humans that populate them. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has his own rant about design and operational mistakes common to the blog space.

Blogs should be considered independent websites, with well-considered posts to help the user with navigation while lending visual appeal and strong subject matter. Funny, many don’t turn out that way.

From Nielsen, here are four key blunders in blogging:

Vague Posting Titles
Your headlines should not only be appealing, they should spell out the gist of your content in a few direct words. Blog readers, like all Web aficionados, are skimmers. Get to the point immediately. Moreover, headlines are served up in RSS feeds. You want readers? Put a hook in their eye.

Mishmash Topics
Your readership will visit on a regular basis to receive a known quantity. That means you need to be consistent. Think of a food franchise with a devoted clientele. People order the same thing every time. Visit a hamburger joint in Tokyo and you’ll get the double patties in a familiar wrapper that you find in Cleveland.

Irregular Publishing
Miss a few days and you’re toast. Think old media. If you opened the front door in the morning and the newspaper wasn’t there, wouldn’t you grumble?

Links to Nowhere
Simply adding a hypertext anchor to a string of words won’t help the user. Affix generous “mouse over” text so visitors can see where they’re going. Let them make an informed decision before linking off your site. Consider opening your links in a fresh window so your blog won’t disappear the moment users click them.

Source
Jakob Nielsen