Top 10 Easy Tips to Make Your Blog More User Friendly

When I first started blogging I read a good book about how to blog. I remember some of the ideas, but unfortunately have forgotten the title of the book. Some of the following are taken from that book, other ideas are from the Internet.

1.) Have an "About" page - Tell readers something about you. Make it short, to the point, but interesting. Tell them something that is different about you then most.

2.) Use readable fonts - Take a good look at your blog as if your seeing it for the first time. Can you read the font? Is it large enough? Are the colors in such a mixture that it can be read? Recently I saw a blog that had black font on cranberry colored background. I couldn't read it because of the color combination. My blog buddy LadyBanana found this cool tool so you can "test your blog in many browsers... If you are wondering if your blog looks good in all browsers check it out. It take a little while to work." - BrowserShots (Thanks LB!)

3.) Place Social Bookmarks on your blog.

4.) Page Load Speed - There are still a large number of Internet users that use slow dial-up connections. Even with high-speed connections some pages just don’t load very quickly. "Most of your visitors will be fairly impatient and pages that load slowly could chase them away...Factors that influence the load times of pages include the number and size of images, extra items like flash, the amount of excess code, and the size of your pages." It will be more user friendly to keep the number of post per page low. A good example of this is my blog buddy eastcoastlife. She keeps the number of her posts per page low, about 3. (Maximum should be 7.) As you can see her blog certainly doesn't suffer for it, just the opposite. She gets tons of visitors, and often 70, 80, 90 or more comments per post! Way to go eastcoastlife!

5.) Make sure your blog has an RSS feed - Some people may not read a blog simply because they don't have that option available.

6.) Post should be the length of an E-mail - Most posts should be brief, about 1 to 3 paragraphs long. I realize that some of us need to get things off our chests, but try to fit some short posts in too. Many readers have dozens of blogs to read, and may not comment on your blog if most of your posts are long.

7.) Reader focus - Present your posts in a way that speaks to your visitor's wants and needs. It's fine to have a personal blog about yourself, but write mostly posts that you think would be of particular interest to your readers.

8.) Typographical errors - Check both spelling and grammatical errors so that your blog looks more professional. Admittedly I'm not the best at this, but at least I make an attempt. Run it through spell check, and grammar check if you have it.

9.) Use tags - This will organize your posts, and help readers find a specific past post that may interest them.

10.) Read the source list below - It will give you many more ideas... Happy Blogging!



Sources -
9 (+1) Tips For Writing User-Friendly Content
10 Styling Tips to Make Your Business Blog More Uses Friendly...
4 Characteristics for User-Friendly Websites (#4 taken for here)
101 Blog Tips I learned in 2006
Blogging Tips for Beginners
So You Want to Be a Blogging Star? by NY Times
Blogging Tips - Hundreds of Resources For Finding Content...