Photography: Hedge Maze by Ingorrr

In light of the positive feedback received for A Beginner’s Guide to Making Your Site More Usable, I’ve composed a 19 point checklist that should be useful to any blogger looking for a practical way to evaluate (and improve) the usability of their blog. Many of the principles here will apply to websites, as well. Read More…

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? Read More…

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. Read More…

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you’ll know that I’m a big fan of simplicity, usability and removing web clutter.

I recently read A Guide to Creating a Minimalist Home at Zen Habits and it had quite an effect on me — and others too, if 2399 Diggs are anything to go by. There are clearly a number of strong benefits to simplicity in the home, but what about simplicity on the web?

This question got me thinking about the benefits of approaching our blogs, websites and content with a minimalist mindset. What follows will be a complete guide to creating a minimalist website. The guide is broken up into individual elements.

Complete minimalism isn’t for everyone but I hope you’ll consider each element individually and on its own merits. There may be just one or two minimalist things you could do to imbue your website with a little more simplicity and clarity. Read More…

Image source.

Aggregating links to content by other authors has been a staple item on the web content diet for years. Unfortunately, it’s an area almost completely devoid of innovation. Links are returned like results from an intelligent search-engine: a title, a description, a recommendation — as if things couldn’t be done any other way.

In this post, I want to suggest a number of new and interesting ways links could be both aggregated and interacted with. Read More…

Photography: morning clutter by mary_gaston22

Tied to the internet productivity movement is the internet uncluttering movement. There are a slew of new websites dedicated to helping you unclutter your home, your work and your life.

I want to contribute to this movement with a manifesto for defeating blog clutter. Blog clutter is the stuff your readers really don’t need, and it serves mainly to get in the way of your content and other vital information. Your content and important pages are the signal, and blog clutter is the noise. You can enhance the first by cutting out more of the second.

The 50 tips in this article will help you unclutter your sidebar, your footer, your posts, and your blog as a whole, and in doing so, enhance the simplicity and usability of your content-centered blog design. Read More…

Photography: Being different by dao hodac

Your website or blog’s design is important. It’s the medium your readers use to interact with and consume what you create. Most of all, it represents an opportunity: to draw readers into your content by presenting it as clearly and functionally as possible.

That’s all well and good, but a more difficult question to answer is: does my design work? Is it a tool my readers use, or an obstacle they have to work around? Read More…