Having spent a considerable amount of time compiling the top 100 UK blogs list it seems that most bloggers are lagging a long way behind “normal” websites in terms of usability.
The points below are a collection of the major problems I see on blogs every day. Remember that a blog doesn’t have to look any different to a major newspaper website, blogs are just platforms for people to publish content online. The sooner we start to embrace usability the quicker the rest of the world will want to read what we have to say.
Menus
You might have a list of 200 places you want people to look at but including more than 10 links in your menu is bad. Nobody will click your menu if it has a huge list of links.
Pick the most popular pages and categories on your site and use them to form the menu. If you want to link to more than a few pages from the menu break it up using sub headings.
Blogrolls
Listing hundreds of sites in your blogroll doesn’t help you and it probably doesn’t help the sites you are linking to either. Google devalues sitewide links and might even think you’ve been selling links.
If you really like somebody then drop them a link every now and again from one of your posts. If you really have to create a blogroll create a separate page to avoid cluttering up your theme.
Tall pages
If you publish all your posts in full on your homepage the page becomes really really hard to read. Some blogs have homepages that are 25,000 pixels tall (thats 25 times the width of your PC screen). Should you expect people to read that far down your page?
Linking your titles
Readers expect the title of a blog post to be a link to the full page version of that particular post. Having a small “permalink” at the bottom isn’t a substitute.
Building feed subscribers
Those of you who are not building feed subscribers are missing a trick. Let your readers sign up by email and RSS and offer a nice post explaining how they can do it. Link to the post from next to your feed button.
Thanks to the email subscriptions offered by people like Feedburner even people who’ve never heard of RSS can sign up.
Buttons
Although being featured in 15 different blog directories might have been important to you last year ask yourself if you really need to keep linking to them?
Do you want to devote valuable real estate in your navigation area to what boils down to a free advert for a web directory?
Bad news for those of you who were hoping the SEOmoz landing page contest would prove the end for long sales pages, this monster was the winner.
People who buy after viewing these pages must have a much larger attention span than me, I prefer the second placed page by Carlos Del Rio featuring Will.
Rand wonders why the conversion rates for people clicking through from the winning page were so much higher than Carlos’s entry, the answer is pretty clear to me – anybody who read through the whole of the page must be pretty certain they want to buy the product.
UK registrar 123-reg.co.uk has had a fair few customer relations issues in the past. Today I was digging into an issue for a client site and found some interesting things related to the way 123 Reg handles parked pages.
The problem was that the clients site didn’t open when you missed the www out of the domain. For example visiting this link was OK but this one takes you to a parked page (this site isn’t my client, just an example).
A quick check on how many sites 123 Reg has parked and indexed in Google reveals about half a million so there are plenty of trusted domains to have fun with.
123 Reg has left a nice XSS hole in their parked pages allowing any users to create an unlimited number of links on spam sites like this one and even better this one.
Basically every single one of the half million domains parked with 123 Reg can be injected with links to whatever sites a spammer wants.
Yesterday I spent a frustrating hour trying to create a web shop for a
new client. I’ve not installed an open source php web store for a
couple of years and assumed that things would have moved on a bit
since my last Oscommerce install in 2005.
Having installed Oscommerce via cpanel I loaded up the site and got a
blank white page with the following error at the top:
Server Requirement Error: register_globals is disabled in your PHP configuration. This can be enabled in your php.ini configuration file or in the .htaccess file in your catalog directory.
No detailed instructions on how to fix it, no link to the support section of the site. Just an unfriendly error message. Obviously I know about php so
knew exactly what the message meant but how is a normal user supposed
to know how to turn register globals on using htaccess? Googling the
error message told me that the htaccess files in every directory
needed to be altered to make the software work. Having register
globals turned on is a security risk and it seems unbelievable that
open source software, which may well have security holes, still
requires this in 2007.
After the poor user experience of this first error message I decided
to try Zen Cart which is a derivative of Oscommerce and appears to be
regarded as a better solution.
Zen Cart installed OK but the admin section is unbelievably
complicated. I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to upload my
first product and even then got an error message about some undefined
variable in a php foreach loop on line 317. The standard template wasn’t the best either.
Zen Cart has a terrible url structure so the first mod was a search
engine friendly url plugin which provided another poor user
experience. I think I got this wrong somehow and caused the php error
message mentioned above. There are loads of files to be uploaded to
different places and the instructions are not very clear. How hard
would it be for the urls to be search engine friendly by default?
WordPress
If you spend a few hours installing plugins and themes WordPress is
great. However, out of the box it has awful themes, bad optimisation
and unfriendly urls. Imagine if the default WordPress install had urls
that actually looked nice and every page had a unique title and meta
description. How amazing would it be to open up your blog for the
first time and see a really nice theme that you might actually use
rather than something that only millionaire owners of dating sites
dare to leave unmodified.
WordPress already has the capabilities to do this and I really can’t
figure out why they don’t. Thousands of bloggers are left scratching
their heads trying to create better blogs without knowing which
plugins to install. If the WordPress team just made the software work
as it should right out of the box the internet would be a much better
place.
Often described as “voodoo” by frustrated webmasters the use of mod_rewrite and htaccess files is one of the more advanced tasks a web developer has to face.
The good news is that unless you are looking for really advanced solutions you don’t have to fully understand how they work to use them on your website. Most of the htaccess and mod_rewrite tips on this page can simply be cut and pasted into a text file and uploaded to your server. Read more →
Here are the first 6 website reviews. They are intended to be my first thoughts on how to improve the site and didn’t take long to write, if they seem harsh I apologise but with lots of sites it is hard to go into too much detail.
If you have any questions please post in the comments. To get your site reviewed visit the website reviews page.
The first thing I noticed was that the site needs a common layout and better images of the wood burning stoves. Some pages look different to others. This helps build up peoples trust of the site.
Also the work at home niche is so packed with sites of a similar feel that to stand out I think you have to really go with a nice layout to appear legitimate. I would move to WordPress and one of these themes.
I would remove the links to Go Articles as well as the link partners in the footer. Also remove the stats links at the bottom.
You would do well to move the blog to your own domain under either the blogger hosted program or on WordPress. Sites that are mainly blogs will be able to build far more natural links than commercial sites. Once you get links & rankings you can flip the site and make it more commercial.
If you struggle to get people to link to you then you might want to find a better domain name without the hyphens.
From the affiliate marketing side you should pass your affiliate links through redirects so they don’t look like affiliate links. Also when you get a new design try hiding some affiliate links in the navigation sections.
Firstly, why does your homepage link pass through Alexa? This might harm the flow of PR through the site.
Optimising a forum to gain more traffic is hard, make sure you follow this guide and also remove session id’s from your pages when Google visits.
Forums are great for long tail traffic once you have loads of posts. The key to getting long tail traffic is to have enough PageRank spread around your forum so submitting to some quality directories in your niche and getting some deep links will work wonders.
Monetising a forum is hard so you might do well to turn the front page into a blog where you can stick some affiliate links in the navigation and add some sports product reviews every so often. This will also give you some good content to attract links.
Rankings are very good, clearly an authority site. I would focus on the design to increase the number of leads. Not sure what the level of long tail traffic is without seeing the logs but that would be a good area to concentrate on as well.
Making the site wider & shorter will increase sales. Try to break up the blocks of text on the homepage a bit. The key is to test, keep modifying the page to see what works.
Move the blog onto the main domain using the hosted blogger program. Start writing articles like these on the blog and you might get some nice natural links.
Also visit all the results from this search and make sure all the titles and snippets are perfect. 64 pages are broken. Alter the meta description tags on pages like this to be more appealing to humans.
I would create a logo for the top left of your site (we are writing a tutorial about creating logos next week) and make it a link to your homepage. Also you might want to use WordPress and one of these templates. As well as a blog platform WordPress is a really good CMS thanks to the sheer number of free themes and plugins available.
If you can add a blog and build up some credibility you will start to attract natural links and citations. Until you start getting lots of search traffic it will be hard to monetize your site with affiliate programs.
Really you should consider trying to find a shorter domain and 301 redirecting the old one too it. To get natural links you need to appear to be a legitimate business or an authority site and your domain is just too long for this.
This site has quite a few affiliate links so you would get more clicks if you disguised the links and passed them through redirects such as yoursite.com/product.php
I prefer sites that sit in the center of the page but I guess it’s a personal preference. What does anybody else think?
Google doesn’t know about many mentions of your site so you probably need to focus on the marketing rather than making money straight out of the gate. The key is to see which affiliate links are making you the most money and put those in the best positions possible. Experiment with blending the links into your navigation and making them stand out in your content to see what works.
I love the way you are using bright pictures on your blog, nice job. Maybe you could remove the blogger bar from the top of the page? The images have no alt text and don’t have keywords in the filenames so you are missing out on traffic from Google Images, check this guide for more details on fixing this.
The best way to monetize a recipe site is probably books and cooking equipment affiliate programs. Try Auction Ads and the Amazon affiliate program and do some product reviews with affiliate links in.
Make sure you are commenting on other blogs and emailing bloggers to make relationships. Try link bait articles such as “Top 10 meals to make you lose weight” or even trying to make variations of recipes seen on TV so you can catch search traffic when people are looking for them.
If you see a cool recipe on TV start an Adwords campaign to target it. Also write posts explaining how readers can sign up to your RSS feed or email subscription as readers might not be as web savvy as tech blog readers.
As with any local business you can get good links by mentioning the other local businesses. I would create a directory of restaurants and local attractions and make good use of the Google maps you have.
Update From today we are no longer able to offer website reviews. Having about 50 sites per day to review has been a bit overwhelming and I can’t find the time to do them all so rather than leave people disappointed I am altering the service. We were even getting review requests from people selling wood burning stoves.
In future if you want to ask a question please email me using the contact page and I will post the answer on the blog. Please don’t be scared of asking something, if you don’t know the answer then other people probably have the same question too.
Quite a few people are asking me questions about affiliate marketing and how they can build lots of natural links to their sites.
Rather than giving out free private consulting I thought it would be fun to review their sites on the blog. One thing led to another and I now have a list of 30 sites that need reviewing.
I will be making the reviews very useful not just to the site owner but hopefully to everybody else as well. Most tips will work well on all types of sites.
If you want your site reviewing please leave a comment in this thread. If you need advice on a specific aspect please add the details to your comment.
Hopefully the reviews will have some comments from a guest blogger who is an average web user as well.
Digg.com has a pretty major problem today after the new threaded comment system was widely slammed by Digg users.
Almost 4,000 users have dugg up this story and the first comment “No kidding. This sucks” has received over 1000 diggs so far.
Mashable has a number of interesting questions but the key aspect is for Digg to figure out how long to keep the comment system running and what to do about the revolt.
Is this a justifiable revolt? Do the majority of Diggers really think that the new system is awful, or is it just a vocal minority that’s winning the argument? Will this turn into another catastrophe, and will Digg again be forced to change something because the users didn’t like it? And, most importantly, what will happen if Digg users massively revolt some big feature that brings revenue to Digg, like the upcoming restaurant & product reviews, as announced by Kevin Rose? So far, the feedback on that idea hasn’t been positive.
How Facebook stopped the revolt
Facebook had a similar issue last September when they launched news feeds so people could gain easy access to updates from their friends. Users hated it and threatened to boycott the site.
Facebook solved the issue by allowing 100,000 users to help shape the future of the site. This open consultation has helped Facebook continue to grow and stopped the user revolt in its tracks.
It’s very hard for a site to launch a new project and be told straight away that it sucks. It’s even harder to accept the comments and pull the new features from the site.
In most cases the best method is to let users trial the features and then allow them to offer feedback and suggestions and even vote on how the system should work. Give the power back to the users – they only want whats best for the site.
If your community is especially vocal like Digg then you really can’t afford to let a user revolt happen for more than 24 hours.
Pingdom have released a nice new tool today to test how quickly your website loads. The service loads up your site including images and javascript files in the same way as a standard web browser to give an accurate measurement of the load speed.
Here are the first 6 
