How usable is my usability site?
Like many web designers, I tend to treat my website like the shoemaker's children; the clients get shiny new shoes while little Billy and Sally wear carved-out potatos on their feet. Likewise, this being about version 1.5 of my blog, many of the usability principles I preach aren't put into practice as well as they should be.So, have at me: What about this site is unusable and could stand improving? I'll get the ball rolling: the debabblog currently has no navigation (without going back to the home-page) directly from individual posts to other posts. I still too often make the mistake of designing navigation for the home-page, while the vast majority of my traffic comes from links, RSS, and search engines, directly inbound to specific content.
Go ahead, don't be shy. Beyond my blog, though, what do you generally find to be the necessary and useful components of a good blog, and what major features help and hinder usability?
AL
· Wednesday, March 14Well I love the beautiful simplicity of this site. However, a few points to make:
1- On my first visit, especially to the archives, I had trouble understanding the orange bars and what they stood for. Going back to the homepage, I found in grey barely-readable text what they meant "GEEK Factor" so I assumed that it's how advanced the article is.
2- There's no search function any where on the website and I believe this is one of the most important ones to have in a blog.
3- The "What's a debabblog?" section could use a little shortening to answer the first-time visitor's main question (What's this blog) quickly without going about geeks and their natures etc.
Just my two cents. Keep writing this great stuff.
Dr. Pete
· Thursday, March 15Thanks, Al & Mike. Unfortunately, being a stubborn control-freak who decided to code his own site instead of using off-the-shelf software, now I actually have to do this stuff :)
Al, I agree with you pretty much completely. The Geek Factor is a gimmick I'm having trouble letting go of, but I could at least make that text darker and take it off the archive. Now that I'm at 60+ posts, I'll definitely look at search and maybe some navigation to "greatest hits" on the right. I'll probably also shorten those two intros (combine into one) and then link to a full "about" page that promotes by consulting business.
Greg Scowen
· Friday, March 16As others have mentioned, it would be great to see search.
Another thing that is very helpful is categorisation. If you could add some categories and assign your posts to these, we could come along and find what we are interested in much quicker.
Dr. Pete
· Friday, March 16I've got to admit, Greg, I'm still a luddite when it comes to tagging. Partly, I don't use it that much, so I'm not sure I understand the value yet. Partly, though, I'm such a perfectionist that I know I'll create a bunch of categories, never be happy with them, and use up all my free time retagging my blog posts every day :) I would be curious to hear from others about how they think categories have helped their blogs.
Pete
· Monday, March 19The text is way to wide. It's terrible to read. If i'm on the end of a line, I lost where I was and start to read the same line again (or two lines beneith it).
Dr. Pete
· Monday, March 19Pete; I agree that I could probably use some more whitespace, but I'm curious: what's your viewing resolution? I'm trying to decide whether to stick with variable width or go for a fixed-width format.
tom sherman
· Tuesday, March 20For me, the most important aspects of blog design are:
- Clean colors
- Obvious permalinks
- Concise sidebar
- Easy to contact the author (this is a HUGE pet peeve!)
- Good tagline for the blog so I know what I'm looking at
- Clear differentiation (size, color) between headlines, text, links, and meta info
tom sherman
· Tuesday, March 20Almost forgot.. an RSS autodiscovery meta tag! I hate it when they're not in the html!!!
Pete
· Friday, March 23My resolution is 1280 * 1024. With a 1024 * 768 the width of the text is better (but still to width with almost 20 words a line).
For this reason I always prefer fixed websites.