ArticlesNielsen Tells Me What To Do
Back in October, I read Jakob Nielsen‘s warnings about the Top Ten Design Mistakes for Weblog Usability.
- No Author Biographies
- No Author Photo
- Nondescript Posting Titles
- Links Don’t Say Where They Go
- Classic Hits are Buried
- The Calendar is the Only Navigation
- Irregular Publishing Frequency
- Mixing Topics
- Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
- Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
How did I score?
I thought: “Hey, that would make an moderately interesting blog article, scoring myself out of ten. Let’s see, I fail #2, #3, #4, #5 and #8, but I have a spirited defence for some of them.”
For example, I avoid #2 to reduce problems with #9, which I mention in my solution to #1. (Oh dear, I suspect I just lost half my remaining audience with that sentence.)
Atwood Tells Me What To Do
The very next day, I read Jeff Atwood‘s blog article on the very same topic. He’s beaten me to it.
Atwood admitted to failing #2 and #5 on his Coding Horror blog. (He’s since addressed #2.) In a recent comment on this blog, he reiterated the need for a “greatest hits” list (#5). He also points out the omission of “disabling comments” as another mistake.
Why should I listen to these guys?
I should listen to Jakob Nielsen because if you type “Jakob” into Google, he’s the top hit. You don’t get much more authoritative than that.
I should listen to Jeff Atwood he has shown the ability to make an article into one of my “greatest hits”, from a popularity perspective, simply by whether he deigns to reference one of my pages on his site, and thus sends a small fraction of his readers my way!
Why shouldn’t I listen to these guys?
Because I am not particularly proud of the most popular hits – I am not convinced that they are my best work.
Let’s look at them now:
- Pursuing Sudoku with Pseudo-code – while it is my number one best-seller, I am kind of bored of the whole Sudoku fad. (I even saw a Sudoku board game in the shops today.) Just based on the comments on the currrent Sudoku articles, I could produce at least two or three more blog articles based. Based on that I could probably get even more Sudoku-loving readers through, but I can’t seem to find the motivation to talk on the topic. It’s a solved problem, let’s move on.
- EmailShroud 1.0.1 – I am proud enough of this one, and I am happy if people are finding it useful. However, it is a specialist topic that can be found referenced in all the appropriate specialist web-pages. It isn’t something that needs further highlighting to the casual browser who has found this site by googling “sudoku”, and is now looking for other interesting articles to read.
- CLOSE THAT WINDOW! – My first ever article, and probably my best; how sad is that? I would be happy to highlight it more, though.
- Plugging plugins is chic geek – What’s with that? Why should this one deserve fourth place in popularity? It is a dull laundry-list of plugins.
- Judging the initial WordPress Google Sitemap Plugins – More fascination with plugins? That’s three of the top five.
What Should I Do?
Rather than a popularity rating, perhaps I need to use a personal rating system of what articles I consider classic hits.
I just wish I could improve my story-telling so that it could rate better when compared to the geeky articles. I have more fun writing the stories.
Perhaps my real fear is that I don’t think I can churn out high-quality blog articles at the same rate as other techie bloggers, including Nielsen and Atwood.
Variety of Topics
That brings me to mistake #8. I chronically mix topics. I don’t need a top 5 list of articles. I need a top 5 list of puzzle discussion, a top 5 list of usability posts, a top 5 list of geek-related stories, a top 5 list of non-geek stories, etc.
I have been considering Nielsen’s advice to split multi-topic blogs into several separate blogs with some fear and uncertainty.
It’s not clear where the best split should be made. This is what led me to the previous observation that the current category implementation isn’t sufficient to let the reader decide on the split of articles they are interested in.
What’s Wrong With Variety?
Nielsen warns that with mixed topics:
The only people who read everything are those with too much time on their hands (a low-value demographic).
That’s an odd claim. Low-value in which sense? I am not selling time-planners or expensive watches here. I am writing a blog. Regular readers that read most of the articles and comment on a few? That is all I have ever hoped for.
Where to next?
I haven’t got an answer to all this yet. I’m still mulling it over.
In the meantime, I will run an experiment soon: one month of avoiding mistake #3, to see if I can live without the cute puns.
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on December 8, 2005
I recently said to someone else that “it’s all downhill from birth.†Funny how often I’ve noticed the general thought pop up since.
Well, except if you consider the whole “personal brand†thing, in which people read a weblog because they’re interested in the voice as much as in what it has to say on the topics that initially brought them to the weblog.
I took another approach to this (a month before Nielsen wrote his screed, even). I find think avoiding witticisms entirely just makes things really bland.
Comment by Sunny Kalsi on December 10, 2005
Great. I was almost going to write an article on my blog disagreeing with yours, but I found I not only agreed with you, but you brought up every issue I had with the 10 in your defence.
My most popular article is the Kari one. It’s an article I posted to out-do another poster on the same blog. The satire, both in the text as well as in the writing (“all filla no killa”), I feel, was not appreciated by most of the readers. I wouldn’t want this thing referenced forever as my top article, even if I could do it with blogger.
I would agree with Aristotle on the “bland title” thing. I have fun with my titles, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’d say you’re generally pretty good with titles yourself. I’d like to do his “summary” thing if I could. I dig the idea that there are two purposes of a title, to inform and entice.
I’d also like to defend #4. I think a link should serve as a sort of “proof” of what you’re talking about (the Kari link above demonstrates). It doesn’t need to tell you where it’s linking, because your text should make that clear. Using, say, the title of the link’s webpage as the title of the link is something that I wouldn’t be against, however.
The only other notable thing that my blog does that yours doesn’t is #10, and I justify that thusly: I want to be ordinary. I’ve had many self-created websites, and they’ve all died some form of horrible death. I just don’t trust myself with not playing with a website to the point of destruction. In addition, if blogger dies, a lot of idiots are going to be angry, and if I know one thing, in a witch-hunt the best mob is one made up of idiots.