Recommended reads for blog design/usability information?

November 21, 2005 6:15 PM

What are your recommended reads (print, webpage, etc) for blog design/usability information? What makes or breaks a blog? Bonus: Examples of what to do and what not to do.

I've been running a niche blog for about 8 months and since then the site has evolved quite a bit from what I started out with. Since then traffic has also been on a steady, but slow, increase.

Recently I've become more and more interested in usability and design elements - what are the best ways to get a large variety of information and offerings out there?

Right now I'm using a modified version of Drupal to try and accomplish this - but I'm not particularly tied down to anything.

Also - anything with regards to style (like posting length) would be great also.

Thanks.

posted by tozturk to computers & internet (7 comments total)

useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's website is a must read for anything related to web usability. Be sure to read Usabilty 101 and the Top Ten Mistake of Web Design
posted by blue_beetle at 6:58 PM on November 21, 2005

(and you'll probably be interested in his Weblog usability column)
posted by blue_beetle at 6:59 PM on November 21, 2005

But be sure to take him with a block of salt. Look at how hideous and hard to read his own website is. Split between the eyes.
posted by fake at 9:13 PM on November 21, 2005

Nielsen is good to read, but I thought it was glaring that he left RSS feeds out of his Weblog column. Given that Yahoo, MSN & Google all support RSS feeds on their personal homepage, I think RSS is a great way to respect your readers time without expecting them to internalize your publication schedule.
posted by Good Brain at 9:45 PM on November 21, 2005

http://www.alistapart.com/ is a good place to start.
as is http://www.digital-web.com/

I find Jakob a bit too "black or white" and not willing to tone his message at all, a lot of good stuff with a sprinkling of absolute nonsense at times. He's not always right (who is!)
posted by snowgoon at 2:06 AM on November 22, 2005

I'll second the vote for A List Apart, I think you might like to start with this article, High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization on the basis that good usability and design comes from first understanding standards and accessibility guidelines. And it'll certainly help push your site up the search engine ladders.

I don't hold much stock with Mr Nielsen, despite his apparent popularity. I think it's more to do with the fact that he go there first. But there are far better articles and tuorials freely available online now.

Fellow MeFite and accessibility guru Joe Clark has an excellent book which he has made available online - Building Accessible Websites.

Mark Pilgrim has also generously made his book Dive Into Accessibility free online. Another great read.

The Web Standards Group has an excellent mailing list and archive and a good list of resources to find out more.

First up though, make sure that your code validates, first the html and then the css. If you're a Firefox user, download Chris Pederick's Web Developer Extension (there's a similar one for IE now). This gives you easy access to the W3C Markup Validation Service and css validator (Tools=>Validate x).

Good luck!
posted by ceri richard at 3:55 AM on November 22, 2005

Bonus: Examples of what to do and what not to do.

Substance over style. There are a lot of well-designed blogs that, if they're lucky, get bookmarked and stashed away in some folder labeled, EXAMPLES OF GOOD WEB DESIGN.

Focus on content. If you're a writer, you should read books about style and voice and writing technique; but those books shouldn't comprise more than 5% of your reading, after Dickens and Poe and Hemingway and Shakespeare. Same principle here: Content, content, content.
posted by cribcage at 7:36 PM on December 31, 2005