Irrelevant Ramblings

Frustrating Navigation

If visitors have a hard time navigation through the site to find what they are looking for, many of them will leave. I’m sure we’ve all been in the position of the frustrated visitor. To make things easier, navigation should be given plenty of thought and attention. The pages that are most important or most commonly sought after should be very easy to find, and navigation should be logical and intuitive. Larger sites can use a sitemap and/or a sitewide search to help visitors who want to use them.

Annoying Advertisements

While ads can lead to lost visitors because of clicks on the ads, the can also chase visitors away is they are too distracting or intrusive. Most visitors now have come to expect ads on websites and blogs, and you shouldn’t lose many visitors on that principal alone. However, if you use accept ads that are overly flashy, have moving parts or changing colors, you could chase some people away.

Slow Loading Pages

No one likes to sit and wait for pages to load, and if it takes too long visitors simply won’t wait. This is obviously influenced by the connection speed of the user, so some of it is out of your control. However, you can use a stats program like Google Analytics to tell you what percentage of your visitors have different types of internet connections. From this data you can get a good idea about how fast your pages need to load. If most of your visitors are using dial-up, page loads should be as quick as possible. On the other hand, if most of your visitors are on high-speed connections, you can take some more liberty with the design and content.

Audio or Video that Starts Automatically

Although audio and video are very common online today, most visitors prefer to have the option to start it themselves. Visitors that are greeted with a startling sound that they didn’t choose to start will often click the back button and be gone. If you use these elements in your pages, give the visitor the option to start them. LOSE THE MUSIC even if you have a photography site.

Poor Readability

If visitors aren’t able to read the content, or if they have a hard time doing so, they may just leave. This is especially an issue with blogs. Be careful with background colors and images, as well as text color and link color, and also make sure to use adequate whitespace. Things like headings, lists, and short paragraphs can also improve readability.

Outdated

Have you ever landed on a page that said “last updated 2001?? Depending on what you are looking for, this page may be of no use to you. Things online change so quickly that old information is often irrelevant. When setting up a blog one of the decisions you’ll have to make is whether or not to show the post date. Readers often like to see the date just to understand the context of the post and to understand its significance, but showing the date can also cause some lost visitors if they arrive at older posts.

(HT: vandelay)

There are a million or more posts out there about SEO. SEO for your site and for your blog is important but, it’s only half the battle. Page load speed is of major importance these days.  As pages get bigger and have more content, they load slower.  So here are 6 ways you can speed up your WordPress blog.

1. Use WP Super Cache

One of the better known techniques for speeding up WordPress is to install the WP Super Cache plugin. It caches your site for super-quick loading. It’s as simple as that. Install it and forget about it (and then promptly remember it when you wonder why your design changes aren’t showing next time you edit your theme files!).

2. Disable Unwanted Plugins

If your site is loading slowly, look at how many plugins you’re using. If the answer is more than ten, look at the plugins you’re using and ask yourself whether you can integrate them directly into your theme.

While you’re at it, also ask yourself whether you really need the plugin. If you can do without it, do.

3. Optimize Your Images

One of the reason for slow loading site is images, therefore every image should be optimized for web. Simply said, if you’re using Photoshop, there is an option to ‘Save for Web’ which you can use to reduce the image size.

If you don’t have Photoshop or haven’t been using the ‘Save For Web’ option you can improve performance using the Smush.it plugin for WordPress. This plugin will run every image you upload through the Smush.it API which strips all unnecessary data (not quality) out of your images.

4. Optimize Your Database

The best option is to use a plugin: the Optimize DB plugin does what it says on the box. It will optimize your database and remove all post revisions with a one click interface.

5. Remove Flash Plugins

Image rotators or slideshows that use flash slow the load time of your blog.  Instead of using these flash plugins, try using the WP-Cycle plugin instead. It does the same thing as other flash versions, but with substantially faster load times.

6. Display Fewer Posts Per Page

I know that most of us want as much info on each page as we can get. But if you want your blog to load faster (especially photo blogs), more posts slow your page load time.  Trying changing your posts per page setting to 3-5 or use post exerpts. You can change your posts per page in your wordpress settings panel under ‘read’.

What are your tips for speeding up your blog?

Descriptive, dynamic titles! A dynamic name for every page on your blog.

Now this may sound difficult but it’s really easy.

Explanation

When Google, Yahoo or other search engines return results, they provide the title and a short description of the site they are linking to.  These are easy to see becuase, they are Bold and in Blue (see below).

The title comes from the actual <title> tag for your post. In an ideal world the title on each page would contain both to title of the post and the name of the site.

There are two way to make this happen:

1. Change your title manually with every post (this could take a long time if you have multiple pages on your blog).
2. Have you blog change them for you!

#2 is the obvious choice. So how do we make this happen?

Execution

If you use WordPress, this is extremely easy to do.

All you have to do is add one line of PHP between the <title> tags in your theme’s header.php file.

<title>
<?php
    if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) {
        wp_title('',true);
    } else {
        bloginfo('description');
    }
?>
</title>

That’s It!

When you check your site you will notice that the home page will be the name and tagline of your blog (these can be set in your settings section of your WordPress administration panel).

On the other pages of your title will be based on the title of your post and will include the name of your site.