Make things easy for your Blog’s Readers

This is a guest post by Shankar Ganesh from Technology Blog.

Your blog gets quite a number of visits, and probably a loyal reader turnout. But what if you’re not pleasing them, but rather annoying them with little niggles. Here are a few things you can improvise on your blog to achieve better user satisfaction on your blog:

Loading endlessly?

Are you using too many Javascripts, and is your sidebar loaded with stuff that nobody really needs? If the user has to wait for your blog to load, that creates a bad impression. You should look into ways of optimising your site, and speed it up so that it loads instantly (or atleast, faster).

Social Bookmarking Buttons

There are times when you write really useful content worth sharing. A reader may find it worth submitting to social bookmarking sites, but what if he needs to copy the URL, access the site and save it? Time consuming.

Add a few social bookmarking buttons to your posts, so that readers may find it easy to submit and share your content to sites. But take care not to load too many buttons there, that’s even more annoying.

Too many ads?

Is your blog becoming yet another MFA? Too many banner and pop up ads? Turn them off. Your readers don’t to see too many ads.

Particularly, hover ads like the ones from the Kontera ad network, are more annoying and give readers a bad experience on your site. I’ve turned them off, and I suggest you to do the same.

You can use the Who sees Ads? WordPress plugin so that your loyal return visitors don’t see your ads, whereas they’re perfectly visible for the rest of the visitors.

RSS Icon

Your blog has good content, and I’d like to follow your unique articles. What if I don’t see an RSS button? Is it down there in the sidebar?

Preferably, place it in the main fold so that visitors can subscribe immediately without looking around.

Search Box

Suppose I stumbled upon an interesting post from your blog, and I want to read it again – but I couldn’t find it. Searching is the way to go. But are you missing on that, as a blogger?

Make sure you don’t miss to put the search box on top right because that’s where people look for them most of the time. Even more, you can replace your blog search tool with Google’s advanced Custom Search Option. Here’s a quick guide for you to set it up on your blog.

Feel free to have your say in the comments!