10 WordPress Usability Features Your Blog Needs

OK now I’m a Jakob Nielsen/Steven Krug zealot but you have to admit if you’re wanting any kind of 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 where you can view older content or newer content inside of a post but displays the next newest as well as the older post to that .

3 – Footer with Links

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 brainer 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 can’t stress enough how much how much a good GUI on a website is so important.

Design your menu and make sure 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 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 deeper into your own website or on to another website owned by you like twitter for example.

9 – Categories & Archives

Image from sindustries.co.uk

This might seem 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 doesn’t have a contact page or email address then how are you ment to know about any problems or clients trying to contact you ?

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