Top 10 Things To Do To Put Off Your Readers
September 25, 2007
Every blog has good and bad, pretty and ugly, and noble and ignoble features. If a blog provides quality content, I’ll probably ignore its less wonderful aspects, but things get worse when a blogger almost completely forgets the usability of his blog and does whatever random things come to his mind.
Though, what may seem annoying to me, may leave a pleasant impression on you, I believe most of you will agree with me on the following top 10 annoying mistakes some blogs make.
In the spirit of brevity, I’ll not rant on about little details, and provide only succinct description for each of my gripe. Let’s see how it goes.
My top 10 gripes against many blogs
- Gigantic headers - There is no need for a huge header image where a small one will do just fine.
- Too many widgets - I don’t want to play with the pretty widgets, I came here for content, give me the content.
- Frames - Frames are sooo outdated, if you will. They are bad for you (bad SEO practice) as well as annoying for me (they add an extra level of complexity). Don’t make me handle two pages at once.
- Ugly colors - Even though you may like bright purple color as your text background, the rest of us don’t. The same goes for dark backgrounds.
- Bad typography - Typography should be pretty as well as readable. A square typeface may look pretty as a complex pattern, it is disastrous for readability.
- 3 column layout crammed within 600 pixels - Everything looks squashed and crowded. I’ll leave before I suffocate.
- Youtube videos - Unless you run a video blog, or the video is produced by yourself, you’d better link to the original video page. Videos in a blog increase page load time, and sometimes freeze my browser.
- Tons and tons of images - Have I by any chance landed on flickr? Web usability gurus say that images, if used wisely, can improve the readability of web content. Please note the words in bold.
- No clue what the blog is about - Some pages have no ‘About’ message or an ‘About’ page, and poorly-written blog and page titles. All this gives me the message that I am not supposed to know the purpose of the blog. Therefore, I press ‘x’.
- Personal rants - There is nothing worse than a blogger ranting on about his personal affairs on his professional blog.
If you want to add to this list of gripes, please do so in the comments.
Also, please let me know if the post was brief yet effective? I am really starting to like brevity.
This post was written on random post day.
18 comments so far and counting
- Stop! Before You Make Any Of These 5 Website Usability Mistakes
- 5 Reasons Why You Are Not Gaining More Subscribers
- 5 Ways To Make Me Your Subscriber
Come on, say something!
Popular
- How to Get Subscribers While You Sleep
- The Art Of Writing Your Most Popular Posts
- Be Extraordinary: How To Tap Into Your Amazing Creative Power
- How To Kill Procrastinsation For Good - No Kidding!
- How To Use Forums To Drive Traffic To Your Blog
- How To Write More, Worry Less, And Create Great Content
- On-page Social Media Optimization: Double Your Traffic With These Simple Tips
- 11 Tried And Tested Strategies To Market Your Ebook
- Content Cream WordPress Theme
Recent
- Skip the Middleman: Monetizing Your Blog Without a Network
- Hey You! Wanna Post on Blogging Bits?
- 5 Downright Evil Ways to Use Blogs For Profit
- Is Your Blog Worth Two Pennies?
- Doers Win, Talkers Don’t Even Get to Lose!
- Weekend Reading: Kickass Blogging and Design Articles
- Good Bye Spam! Welcome Quality Comments!
Categories
- Blogging Tips
- Building Readership
- General
- Link Building
- Making Money
- Productivity
- Resources
- SEO Tips
- Social Media
- Tutorials
- Design
- WP Plugins
- WP Themes
- WP Tips
- Writing Tips
My Tweets
Do I do any of those?
Scraper sites
Splogs
Bad, unoriginal writing
No experience in supposed niche
Too many ads and social bookmark icons
Just to name a few… That felt better! Glad to get that off my chest.
Jeremy, luckily you don’t make any of those mistakes *claps* Though, I really think you should change your site’s name to “Nusuni Dot Com” to something more meaningful. For example Michael’s blog’s title reads “Better Blogging with Michael” and it gives the new visitors an idea about the subject of his blog. So, you could also say something like “Jeremy on Blogging, SEO, and news” just to be a little more descriptive
Michael, ah yeah.. how could I forget those!
Nice tips , i will try to avoid them .
I’m starting to like, and write, brief posts also. My time is so limited that information in small bites works much better.
Found you through Problogdesign.
I agree with you for the most part… but I also think people shouldn’t be lumped in if they do one of those things. My mom blog has a header larger than yous, and I like it. Just because something is done a lot doesn’t mean you should do the opposite only because it is opposite… you should do what you like based not on what everyone is doing or not doing, but because you like it. (for a personal blog in particular).
I do agree that loads of social bookmarking all over can be annoying. I prefer the rss icon. I do have technorati up though. and my blog log b/c it is fun to see who shows up on it.
Mommy Zabs, a medium height header image is definitely good, but I was talking about extra large headers that serve no good purpose whatsoever.
As for my blog, I am so minimalistic that I didn’t even bother with a header. I only have a top navigation bar, and my logo goes in the sidebar
And thanks for stopping by! Keep listening to Michael’s advice, he’s got a good eye for design related intricacies.
Madhur and SEO Diva, you are welcome guys!
I heartily agree with these. Sometimes they’re not fatal–Cornwall SEO does this weird thing where the post title is about 1/2 of the screen, but I like his content so I suck it up.
But I think he’d do better with a still-mighty 1/4, say, or 1/5.
An outsized header forces too much of your content “below the fold,” where many readers (esp. fickle folks like Stumblers) won’t see it. Give your reader a chance to “stick” to your blog–put your excellent content where it has a chance to grab them!
Sonia, you are right. If they want to keep social media folks engaged, they have to cut down on the size of everything, especially the elements that unnecessarily push the content down the fold.
I’m new to the entire world of blogging (having only started one almost 2 weeks ago and only really studying them for about 3 weeks) and am very appreciative of posts such as these. I can always cut straight to the heart of what doesn’t work with these lists. It seems the “What Does Work” list can be far more arbitrary to one’s taste.
Thanks for the information!!
I am glad you found it informative Grandy. Stick round for more useful tips
I believe that videos can be helpful. In the past on Jatecblog (one of my first posts, now lost) I wrote an article about a program and embedded a video of mine showing how the program worked in the post. I think that, used correctly, embedded videos can be helpful.
I think those preview popups for links in Wordpress blogs and Contera ad popups should be added to this list. They really annoy me when they popup while moving the mouse on a page.
I have made a silly typo in my comment. read “added to this link” as added to this list
Hey no problem, I’ve corrected the typo.