Improving Site Design and Usability
by couldbe studios on Oct 21, 2010
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Some quick tips for making your site more readable and usable.
Some quick tips for making your site more readable and usable.
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Good images make people want to read your posts. Take some time to think about angles, lighting, and focal point when you're taking pictures.
Text size:
Tiny text is hard to read. Huge text can be annoying. Find a middle-ground. Also, make sure you're using a hierarchy of headers: h1, h2, h3, to show importance. For example, your post title might be h1, while section headings like Ingredients or Methodology would be h2.
Contrast: A low-contrast site can be hard to read, especially if any of your readers have color-blindness or a limited range of vision. Some color combinations are harder to read than others. Use a site like Check My Colours to see how your site holds up under various tests.
http://www.checkmycolours.com/
Readability: Text size, font, letter spacing and line spacing all play a huge role in how readable a site is. You can test out various combinations using an online tool like Type Tester.
http://www.typetester.org/
Focal point/call to action
Your sidebars contain secondary information. They should not compete with your main content. Try giving your site the 'squint test' - squint your eyes until all you can see is shapes and note the area that stands out the most. Is it your main content area? If not, you might want to re-think your layout and design.
Your navigation should be as simple as possible. Link to the main sections of your site (which can be pages, categories, or a combination of both). Link to an About page and a Contact page. And then ask yourself what else is really important.
Make sure your site is searchable:
Include a search box in your header or your sidebar. If you don't, you may miss out on a lot of page views by people who are looking for something specific on your site.
Tag your posts and use categories:
Use clear, easy to understand category names and make sure you categorize each and every post. If you find yourself forgetting to add categories to your posts regularly, change the default category from 'Uncategorized' to your most frequently-used category.
Use pretty urls:
There's a big difference between this:
www.couldbestudios.com/?p=11201
www.couldbestudios.com/blogging/wordpress-tutorial
In WordPress this is really easy to change. Go to Settings > Permalinks and choose from the available options (or enter a custom structure - I like /%category%/%postname%/)
Try using a tool like the Firefox add-on YSlow to see how you can optimize your site for faster page loads.
For a WordPress blog, you can install WP-Super Cache to improve site performance.
Tagging gives you a way to add lots of keywords to a post. These can be keywords that aren't already in the post body. This can help people who are searching for one thing find a related post - for example, if you're talking about Hotel deLuxe and you tag the post "portland area hotels," that will come up in a search even if you don't mention those words in the body of the post.
But should you use both tags and categories? Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, says that an either-or approach is fine - either give your post a category or tag it, but not both. I disagree; tags can be used in conjunction with categories to make it easier for your readers to find related articles. The main thing to avoid is duplicating category names in your tags. Google and other search engines will ignore repeated keywords, so at best you're just making extra work for yourself if your tags and categories are the same.
Internal linking: link keywords and phrases to articles you've published in the past. Not only does this help readers find posts that are relevant to them, but it also helps your SEO. Search engines can see how one post leads to another in your blog. I recommend against using a plugin to do this since you'll want to make sure the links are contextual and relevant to the content.
Plugins can also help you optimize your site’s performance to keep people clicking, and you can use things like the All In One SEO Pack to add meta tags and keywords to your site.