Photography: Nooooooo by fabbio

This is the second post in a series on the ‘Simple Web’ philosophy I subscribe to. It’s a philosophy of completing only the actions that grow your site and cutting out those that don’t. You’ll get the most out of this post by reading the introduction to the series, followed by its second part on creating a gripping site.

Once you’ve created gripping content and a gripping environment for it, the next step is to construct a site that resonates with your reader.

You might have the most clickable headlines in the world coupled with a flawlessly simple and usable design, but if your ideas don’t resonate, it won’t count for much.

Resonance is a prerequisite for every reader action that works to grow your site. The behavioral flow is: entry — grip — resonance — interaction — talk, and resonance is arguably the most important link in the chain. Readers won’t interact with the site if they don’t resonate with it. Readers won’t talk about it if they don’t resonate with it. But a reader can talk about it without interacting, and vice versa.

In other words, resonance is key. In this post, I want to show you how to create a site with the resonance of a bell.

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Photography: Grab hold! by jpockele

This is the second post in a series on the ‘Simple Web’ philosophy I subscribe to. It’s a philosophy of completing only the actions that grow your site and cutting out those that don’t. You’ll get the most out of this post by reading the introduction to the series.

If your site — and I use this to mean blog or website — isn’t gripping, readers aren’t going to engage with your content. If they don’t engage with your content, they’ll forget about you.

If your site isn’t gripping, your other actions are wasted. Your articles might be top-notch, but if few visitors are gripped enough to read them from start to finish, you’ll never see the rewards those articles deserve. I don’t mean to sound dire, but a failure to ‘grip’ readers is something I often see crippling otherwise excellent sites.

The key question is: how can I make sure every element of my site is gripping, and how can I remove the elements that aren’t?

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Photography: Sunrise by d’n'c

Most hard questions have simple answers. The hard part is in the doing.

The question: how can I lose weight? can be answered truthfully in one sentence: eat three modest, healthy meals each day (and no more), and make exercising a habit.

But that isn’t good enough. It’s the how that gets us. It’s not enough to say what we have to do. We need to know how to do it.

As bloggers and webmasters, we want most or all of these things: more visitors, more subscribers, more comments, more money, more inbound links, and more people saying good things about us. Our wants aren’t in question. It’s the how that gets us. It’s the how that has us reading a dozen blogs a day, trying to find the answer (or at least a little piece of it).

You can stop searching, for now. The answer is in this post.

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Photography: Usability by SantaRosa_OLDSKOOL

As of today I’ve completed a total of 34 simplicity reviews. I’ve spent some time discussing design simplicity already, but now I’d like to introduce a new topic: web usability.

Design simplicity is about creating a site distilled down to its essential elements. Usability is about creating a site that is easy to use.

This post will attempt to answer the question: What are the basic principles of making a site more usable, and what are the benefits of doing so?

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As of this evening I’ve reviewed 21 blogs with a focus on heightening simplicity and reducing clutter. It has been a privilege to interact with a wide variety of interesting bloggers and to survey the results of the changes.

When receiving feedback I was occasionally asked why I had suggested the removal of a certain element. This was useful as it forced me to encapsulate the rationale behind web simplicity in a few short words.

I thought it would be worth reproducing their essence here, particularly for those who wanted a little more background to the suggestions in their reviews.

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