OK now I’m a Jakob Nielsen/Steven Krug zealot but you have to admit if your wanting any kind of an audience using your site, browsing, selling items, buying items, reading your stories on your blog then you’ve got some usability issues to address.
1 – Pagination
Image from smashingmagazine.com
Pagination is a good usability aid to let users see visually how many “pages” of content your site has and provides away of users to easily browse from new content to very old content. A bonus as well is you also get more page views when users browser the other “pages” advertising score!
2 – Previous Post & Next Post
Image from sindustries.co.uk
A great feature that I think you should use even you already have a “most recent/popular” post’s at the end of your post its the same idea as pagination in which you can view older content or newer content inside of a post but displays the the next newest as well as the older post to that .
3 – Footer with Links
- Image from digg.com
Links in the footer are awesome for users deep linked into your site, helping robots crawl your site and providing a way for your users to find out where they are and where they want to go.
4 – Banner or Company Logo Linked to Homepage
Image from PSD tuts+
I know this one is a no brainier but for those of you that don’t know always make your website header logo or banner link back to your websites homepage this provides a user a “fail safe” in which they can go back to the homepage and start again.
5 – Navigation Menu
Image from aiburn.com
I cant stress enough how much how much a good GUI on a website is so important.
Design your menu and ensure that your menu looks like a menu make sure your buttons are designed to be clicked on so your buttons/menu doesn’t suffer from”menu blindness” make sure you have a hover and an active state I personally think visited isn’t a requirement for Navigation menus but design your hover and active states with a “change” like a highlight or text becomes bold anything that stands out.
6 – Search Box on Every Page
Image from netmag.co.uk
With your Wordpress site include your search in the header file this way users can search your website from anywhere in your website and from any page.
It is also possible to design a search results page that can also add extra usability
7 – Use Headings Properly in Articles
Image from alistapart.com
The proper use of headlines in articles make sure you use your H1 tag’s and maybe give your H2,3,4,5 a different look however on Sindustries I keep my article “Subs” all the same style.
8 – End of post “Stubs”
image from smashingmagazine.com
Post stubs are great for giving users a visual cue to say “stop and go somewhere else” and getting users to go much deeper into your own website or onto another website owned by you like twitter for example.
9 – Categories & Archives
Image from sindustries.co.uk
This might seem very very trivial but considering even the BBC didn’t have categories or archives the result was it made users finding similar style of stories difficult and you couldn’t even look at the past weeks content because they had no archive !
Now wordpress gathers categories and automatically produces an archives, simple help your website visitor out and use them on your site.
10 – Contact Details
Image from abuzeedo.com
What does contact details have to do with usability I hear you say but its simple.
Its to allow users to contact you! If your site doesnt have a contact page or email address then how are you ment to know about any problems or clients trying to contact you ?
Great post – I think you will agree than there is more than ten must-have features that every blog should have – will wait for follow-ups
Hi Maris thanks for the comment! I could have went really far with this article but decided to keep it short and sweet.
However maybe a follow up article would be good … watch this space!