Plead the First

Jakob Nielsen, venerable pundit of website usability, has published a list of the top ten design mistakes made by blogs (via Pharyngula). Here’s a rundown of the list, with some comments of my own:

“1. No Author Biographies”

Whether this is a problem depends on the nature of the blog. Once a blog starts doing independent analysis, there is probably a line that can be crossed where a biography would be useful. However, many blogs are simply passing along news from other sources; as long as those sources are given, I’m not sure a biography of the blog author is that helpful. Mainstream news sites don’t usually seem to have biographies for their reporters, and that’s never been cited as a problem by anyone.

“2. No Author Photo”

I’m not sure how this qualifies as a design mistake. A photo can be a nice touch, but a lack of one isn’t going to hamper your blog’s usability.

“3. Nondescript Posting Titles”

I can agree with this one. Especially when skimming posts through an aggregator, like Greensboro 101 or TriadBlogs, a descriptive title is very helpful. I’ve been guilty of this a few times, leaning a little too much towards cute or mysterious, rather than being upfront about the topic of the post.

“4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go”

This one is a fair point as well. There should be some indication of where a link is going to take you, or what sort of information you’ll find there. Nielsen’s suggestion about using link titles is a good one too.

“5. Classic Hits are Buried”

This is actually somewhat of a pet peeve of mine. Most of my earlier online discussion and debate was done through message boards: Someone would post a topic, and people would comment on it. Whenever a post got a new comment, it moved to the top of the list, so it was easy to find active discussions and keep a conversation going. With blogs, on the other hand, as new posts get added, old ones drop down – and then off – the page, making them less likely to be seen and commented on. Discussions either die or go unnoticed by the majority of readers.

There are ways around this. Many blogs have “sampler” links in the sidebar that highlight older posts. Ideally, I’d like to see a section in the sidebar that gave links to posts that have recently had comments added.

“6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation”

Many blogs have categories listed, and Nielsen mentions this, so I’m not sure why he says that the calendar is the only navigation. He does bring up a good point though about overly-long category lists.

“7. Irregular Publishing Frequency”

PZ at Pharyngula knocks this one down: That’s what RSS feeds are for. True, an irregular schedule may cause you to lose some of your audience, but as RSS and aggregators become more widely used, this will be less of an issue.

“8. Mixing Topics”

I think there’s a place for both focused blogs and less focused blogs. Having a somewhat unfocused blog myself, that is perhaps unsurprising. Recently, I’ve been thinking of the Blogosphere as sort of a distributed message board, where topics and comments are posted and crosslinked across multiple sites rather than under the umbrella of a single site. On a message board, a single poster might make posts and comments in several different topic areas of the board. When that’s brought over to the blog world, you have a blogger who might cover a range of topics on his or her blog.

Additionally, I think that one of the highlights of many blogs is not so much the topics covered, but the voice and viewpoint of the author. I enjoy hearing what various bloggers think about different subjects, and would hate to see those bloggers limit themselves to one narrow topic.

“9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss”

Pharyngula dismisses this design mistake, saying “This is his worst suggestion of them all: muzzle yourself now in preparation for your future corporate overlords. Screw that, bozo.” I think the best course is somewhere in between. You need to realize that whatever you write is going to be floating around in cyberspace for a very long time, and even if you’re posting anonymously, those writings might be connected to you someday. So a blogger needs to be comfortable with the fact that people – including a future boss – could very well find out what he’s been writing about. Does this mean a blogger needs to muzzle himself? That depends on the blogger and his comfort level with others knowing about his opinions. But the decision on how outspoken you are certainly needs to begin with being aware that you aren’t posting in a vacuum.

“10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service”

There are plenty of popular, credible bloggers out there with blogs on blogspot and other similar domains. To be fair, Nielsen says having a generic blog address “will soon be” equivalent to having a Geocities website – not that it is equivalent now – but I’m not sure that it’ll necessarily work out that way. It will really depend on what those credible bloggers with the generic addresses do with their blogs. I think that anyone who was serious about their website back in the day went and registered a domain and paid for hosting, leaving Geocities to turn into a cyber-ghostland. The fact that so many serious bloggers still have generic web addresses leads me to believe that a similar abandoning of the blogspot ship is less likely to happen.

With blogging there seems to be more of a focus on the message, and less on the delivery vehicle. Slick-looking sites and personalized domain names take a back seat to thoughtful commentary and an engagement of ideas.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.