Is Your Blog Easy To Read?

Is Your Blog Easy To Read?



Do you want people to stick around and read your blog? Then you should ask yourself, “Is my blog easy to read?”

Here are some things to check for:

1. Are your colors easy on the eyes?

People are not going to stick around to read a blog that strains their eyes. Pick some easy-to-read colors, like dark gray or black text on a white or off-white background. If that is too plain, at least use dark colored text on a very light background.

You can always dress up the look by putting more color in your heading and sidebar, or add some images.

2. Is your font easy to read?

Take a good look at your font. It may be cool, but is it easy to read? The best fonts for the web are Verdana, Georgia and Lucida Grande, according to Jim Whimpey.

3. Can people figure out your navigation?

I have visited many blogs where I would gladly read more, but after the front page, I have no idea how to find more content.

You might think your blog is easy to navigate, but you are used to it. Ask a friend to see if they can figure it out. You might be surprised. (Especially if that friend is not very web-savvy.)

4. Does it look spammy, with ads plastered everywhere?


5. Do the links stand out?

On some blogs, the links are only subtly different from the rest of the text. If I have to squint to figure out if it is a link, do you think I am going to click on it?

6. Do your pages take a long time to load?

Check your actual page load time here. People will not stick around long if navigation is slow. Try to get your page to load more quickly. Maybe you have too many widgets, or maybe your images are too large or too numerous. Adding width and height attributes to images makes them load faster too. This page will give you ideas on how to improve your load time.

7. Is your page messed up in other browsers?

If you have Internet Explorer already, download Firefox and test there too. If you always use Firefox, test in Explorer. Those should be the minimum you test, but test more if you can.

Also, change your screen resolution (can be done in your Control Panel in Windows) to see how your site looks in different resolutions.

You can also visit Browsershots to get screenshots of your site in different browsers. It takes quite a while, but you don’t have to do this often - just when you make big changes to your template.

Your visitors should feel welcome, no matter what browser or resolution they are using.

8. Are you using too many acronymns, jargon, or slang?

Think about the audience for your site. Will they understand you, or is it going right over their heads? If you want beginners to read your blog, you might not want to use too many technical terms, or, if you do, then define them.

Also keep in mind that you might have readers from other countries. They may understand English, but they may not know a lot of slang terms.

If your site targets a different generation from your own, you might need to adjust your language and even the look of your site. This could happen if you are writing for a niche audience that is “not you”. Keep your audience in mind.

Conclusion:

I hope this checklist will help you look at your blog with new eyes and think about whether you are scaring away any visitors. It might be helpful to get some friends or family members to look at your site and give their opinion as well.

Once you are sure you are not scaring visitors away, then it is time to work on getting more visitors. See my book, Blog Traffic Jump Start, for more information about how to get traffic to your blog.