Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Blog Design Mistakes

Jakob Nielsen, called “perhaps the best-known design and usability guru on the Internet” by the Financial Times, has posted his list of Top Ten Weblog Design Mistakes.

Because I’m always up for a bit of introspection coupled with the occasional criticism, here’s the ones we sometimes mess up:

4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go

I think that’s fine most of the time, but sometimes you want a bit of whimsy in your link, or it’s something not critical to your piece, it’s more of a joke or even an Easter Egg for your readers.  Also sometimes, a call to action that emphasises the need to click is more important than using the words themselves as the click text.  You still want to make the destiniation of the link clear, but the link text itself could be a big “Go there now!”

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency

Guilty! Guilty!  Readers will make a habit of checking you.  Even more important than regular timing, however, is frequent posting.  If you post three times a day, your traffic will grow far more quickly than if you post three times a week, regardless of how precise you are with your posting times.  The other advantage to posting at regular times, by the way, is it builds your own habit and comfort—which is important to your blogging success.

10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

We’re not guilty of that, but it’s very much worth repeating—get your own domain, get a good name, and stick with it.

How does your blog do according to Jakob’s list?

Posted by Travis Smith on 10/17 at 11:45 AM •

Comments

  1. The only thing I was really missing was the picture.  There are pictures of me on my website, but there wasn’t one built into the sidebar.

    I’ve fixed it but maybe not the way Jakob would have liked.

    My Mac is dying and in the shop and one thing I’ve discovered is my blog particularly the sidebar displays wrong.  This may be a direct result of adding that photo Jakob suggested.  I will fix it eventually.  The problem didn’t show up on my Mac, but is happening in Windows/IE which is a far more common browser combination than Mac OS X/Opera.

    Oh well at least Mint works in OS X/Opera.

    Posted by muskie on 10/21/05 at 09:36 PM

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