Four Ways To Annoy Your Readers
It's been a long time since I wrote in this blog (or any other) and many things have changed on the web since then. Social networks have evolved and have become popular, more advanced methods for controlling spam in comments and to stand out from the rest is harder. Some things are better; others are simply different.
So, when I decided to write again (several months ago) I looked in more detail the blogs and sites I visited, in order to learn about current trends in design and technology behind them. While doing this review I realized some things that bothered me, but I had not noticed before.
These small details are not so common to call them trends but could become so. These things (in my opinion) affect the usability of the blogs I've visited. Some of these problems are new, others not. Let's see:
- No date in the post: It seems to be increasingly popular to remove the dates of the articles. It's good that a blog can be navigated without regard to the dates (I'm working on it for this blog) but I use the writing date for judging the relevance of the post, even if it is a timeless article. You can read more in Dates on Blog Posts – Should You Have Them?, an article from ProBlogger
- Some pages only have internal links: Sometimes it's even worse, no links at all. I agree that it is important to have links to other pages within your own site so that the reader can explore, but it's important to let the reader to dig out in the subject. I already discussed this in my article blogging is about linking.
- I can't recognize visited links easily: This is an old issue, and this blog has exactly this problem. I have not finished working on the new design. Everyone, style your visited links! offers an interesting analysis about it and you can find many more with a simple search.
- Category madness: Some blogs suffer excess of categories, many of them redundant. Since categories are one of the most important ways to navigate through your site, they should be kept to a minimum.
Definitely, maybe there are more errors; perhaps showing here in this blog. What mistakes do you think should be added to the list?
