Photo by pingnews
The humble sidebar is almost as old as the web itself, but its true importance is often underestimated. And, let’s face it, it’s very easy to do badly. In an effort to create a sidebar that does everything at once, many people end up creating sidebars that are hardly usable. Too much information causes information overload.
The problem hasn’t arisen because we’re all user-interface dunces. In truth, it’s a simple matter of perspective. As bloggers and webmasters, we created our sidebars and thus know exactly where to look for everything. Because we have important pages bookmarked and generally don’t pour over our own archives, we may rarely need to interact with what we’ve created.
Without being able to look at our design with the fresh eyes of a new visitor, it’s very hard to know what works and what doesn’t. In this post, I want to get inside the mind of a new visitor and prospective loyal reader, and explain how to create a sidebar that works. Read More…
Photo by feaverish
These six themes are at the forefront of modern, minimalist, typographically interesting Wordpress theme design.
I’ve moonlighted as a blog designer, a design consultant and write design reviews every week at ProBlogger. I write on usability, simplicity and minimalism in design. This stuff is important to me, and my criteria for good blog design is difficult to meet. Yep — I’m picky and proud of it.
There are thousands of free Wordpress themes available, and of those thousands, I’ve seen hundreds. Of those hundreds, I would only use a few. Less than ten, in fact: themes I consider simple, usable, elegant, modern and uncluttered. Themes that emphasize what’s important and de-emphasize what isn’t.
If you’ve been thinking about a redesign for your Wordpress blog (or are open to the possibility in future), I’d recommend any of these themes. If you have some knowledge of code, I’ve suggested the customizations I would make to optimize each theme for usability and readability. Read More…
Photo by froodmat
If you’ve been wondering why your blog or website hasn’t been growing as quickly or steadily as you hoped, you might be encountering one (or more) of the five barriers to success. So far, I’ve covered three parts:
- Content with a lack of significance for its target audience.
- A lack of diverse entry points to the site.
- An un-defined or vaguely defined target audience.
In this post, I’ll be outlining the fourth barrier to success: visitors perceiving your site as low quality, even when it isn’t. Read More…
Photo by pingnews
For a static page to become an Archive, it needs only to link to all the content you’ve written.
Despite the freedom of this definition, the archives attached to most blogs or websites are useless to 99% of its visitors.
If you follow the standard ‘months as categories’ model, where clicking on a month will open up all the posts produced during that month, it can only ever be useful to a small percentage of visitors (who either want to read through all your posts or who are, for whatever reason, interested in posts from a particular time-frame).
For many, a crippled format ensures only a tiny fraction of visitors ever interact with the Archives page. It doesn’t have to be that way. In this post, I want to explain three simple methods you can use to craft an archives page that will serve as a key conversion point for new visitors — and a place where loyal visitors become more loyal. Read More…
Photo by kalandraka.
Making your site more usable is really the art of making it easy for visitors to do what you want them to do.
Whether that’s coming to grips with what your site is about, commenting, subscribing, contacting you or buying your product, usability gets results.
“Usability” can seem like a pretty abstract term, though. What does it really mean? What does it involve? How do I get it? Do I have it already?
In this post, I want to discuss just how useful it is to think of your site’s usability as conversational. Read More…
Photo by Stewart.
Thanks to everyone for receiving my guide to finding and using incredible Flickr images so warmly. Finding photos through Flickr seems to be something many have wanted to do but weren’t sure how to go about it (or how to go about it safely).
One question many people had in response to the post was: how do I add credits beneath the photos I use?
In this follow-up post, I want to provide a comprehensive answer to that question. There are a range of solutions here to suit everyone — from the HTML newbie to the CSS pro. Read More…
Photo by Leposava.
I don’t think this blog would be half of what it is without Flickr. The images included with most posts magnetize the eye to the page and create an atmosphere for the rest of the piece. It’s also one of the most commented-on aspects of the blog — the images are something I think leaves an impression on a lot of people.
A question I get often is: how do you find such great images through Flickr? Most importantly, how do you find such great images that you can use freely?
In this post, I want to share everything I’ve learned about how you can quickly and easily find Flickr’s best images to suit your needs, whether it’s for a blog post, an eBook, a design, an artwork or anything else. Secondly, I want to explain how Creative Commons works for Flickr images — and what that means for you. Read More…
Yesterday popular self-improvement blog Zen Habits launched its first redesign. It’s a blog I read regularly and one I know many Skelliewag.org readers also enjoy. The redesign was crafted by one of my favorite blog designers and an all-around nice guy, Collis Ta’eed.
I thought this would be a good opportunity to do something I’ve been waiting to do for a while: a published simplicity review. A simplicity review is a web design review with an emphasis on simplicity and usability.
Rather than simply making recommendations, I want to show you how I approach simplicity reviews: the kinds of questions I ask and the things I look for.
The aim of this post isn’t just to give some suggestions and feedback to Collis, but to give you a toolbox you can use to evaluate the simplicity of the designs you create or customize. Read More…
Photography: The Fountain by Maulleigh
Over the last few months I’ve completed 63 simplicity reviews and given away around 385 viral post ideas (with more still to come!). In that time, I’ve examined and explored around 150 blogs and websites in order to give advice tailored specifically to them.
In this post, I want to address a missed opportunity I observed across many of those sites. The good news is that it’s something that takes minimal time to fix, and that the rewards far outweigh the time required to address this simple problem.
To aid in explaining this, it’s useful to think of visitor attention as a currency. Like money, it’s rarely given away unless the visitor can expect to receive something in return.
Does your site tell visitors directly (not by impliciation), clearly and boldly, what they will get in return for their attention? Read More…
Readers only have so much attention to give, and this variable will expand and contract depending on factors you can’t control: whether they are rushed for time, whether they have had your site recommended to them or have simply stumbled across it, and so on.
Reader attention doesn’t expand depending on how much information your site communicates to them. More elements does not mean they will devote more attention to compensate. Read More…
Deloris Booth