5 Easy Blog Improvements in under 5 Minutes
5 Easy Blog Improvements in under 5 Minutes

5 Easy Blog Improvements in under 5 Minutes

by Alex · 90 comments

Your blog is not per­fect. There are many things you can do to improve your blog, and after read­ing this post — you will be glad you made some of these changes.

There is just so much you can do to improve your blog. You can make a major change to it by adding a new design, or adding a forum to it or some­thing minor like chang­ing a title of a blog post to some­thing more search engine friendly.

What­ever it is you want to do, you do it because you think it will make your blog bet­ter. Of all these lit­tle things you can do to make your blog bet­ter, I came up with five things I found on Blo­gus­sion that I chose to imple­ment with hopes it would make my blog better.

And every­thing I did doesn’t even take five min­utes to implement.

1. Add a “back to top” link to your footer

This is some­thing so sim­ple, but so ben­e­fi­cial. Blogs have a ten­dency to cre­ate huge scroll bars. Whether that scroll bar is long because you don’t use the more tag to cut down your posts, or you get a lot of blog com­ments — the fact of the mat­ter is if you have a huge scroll bar and no easy way to get back to the top, it will annoy us as your readers.

So when a user gets to the bot­tom of the page and sees the link, when the click it — they go to the very top of the page. It’s very easy to cre­ate. Just use this code and add it to your footer somewhere:

<a href="#header">Back to top</a>

It’s just that easy. When that link gets clicked, it auto­mat­i­cally shoots to the top of the page.

More on this method: A Short Story about “Back To Top” Links

2. Lit­tle Icons

Every minor detail counts when it comes to design­ing for a blog. It’s the minor details that make some designs so excel­lent, and adding icons next to links on your blog can really make some parts of your blog stel­lar looking.

Here are a few examples:

Copyblogger uses a nice mail icon on a slant to represent where you can sign up for email updates

Copy­blog­ger uses a nice mail icon on a slant to rep­re­sent where you can sign up for email updates

Nettuts uses a nice RSS icon to represent their forms of subscriptions

Net­tuts uses a nice RSS icon to rep­re­sent their forms of subscriptions

ProBlogger uses icons to represent all kinds of ways to sign up to the RSS feed

ProBlog­ger uses icons to rep­re­sent all kinds of ways to sign up to the RSS feed

3. Cus­tomized Input Forms

Input forms are used all the time on blogs. To sign up for newslet­ters, to fill out a com­ment, and any­thing else that gen­er­ally involves get­ting infor­ma­tion from the user.

Input forms with­out style are often very ugly and bor­ing to use. Luck­ily, they are extremely easy to cus­tomize. You may want to check out a past post on Blo­gus­sion with four tricks to mak­ing input forms great.

More on improv­ing input forms:

4. Cre­at­ing thumb­nails for posts

I love thumb­nails, they make lists look so much more attrac­tive. Just take a look around on Blo­gus­sion, there are thumb­nails to dis­play the pop­u­lar posts on the blog, and there are thumb­nails to rep­re­sent the names of com­men­ta­tors in the top com­men­ta­tors list.

Take for exam­ple my other blog, Asnio. You see thumb­nails every­where on the blog, and it really makes the design stand out. If you use the The­sis theme, using thumb­nails for posts is as easy as it gets.

5. Num­bered page navigation

At the bot­tom of the home­page on Blo­gus­sion, you can see a list of pages you can visit on the blog. All of those num­bers link to a page full of arti­cles on them.

Using num­bered page nav­i­ga­tion gets a lot more posts avail­able to read­ers, which increases pageviews and can really show off the age of your blog with the more num­ber of pages you have. It is a much more effec­tive method of nav­i­ga­tion than the stan­dard “pre­vi­ous” and “next“post links that is stan­dard on many blogs today,

Here is the plu­gin I use to rep­re­sent page num­bers on my blogs. It is very sim­ple to use and comes with some great pre-styled themes.

Down­load WP Page Numbers

A Lit­tle Goes A Long Way

If you imple­ment these five minor changes on your blog, you should see some real improve­ments to your blog usabil­ity wise. As I men­tioned in this arti­cle, every lit­tle detail counts and if you can make your blog more con­ve­nient in even the small­est ways — you will see small rewards.

Photo by Joe Popp

Go to top

Article by Alex

I'm the 17 year old blogger & designer behind Blogussion. I live in New Jersey (but root for the New England Patriots), and am a Junior in High School. You can check out my rarely updated personal(ish) blog, Asnio, or connect with me on Twitter.

From Planning to Earning

A free course that explains all you need to know about maintaining and building a powerful, money making blog.

Information is delivered through a beautiful web guide & a 10 day email course (+ a weekly newsletter). Sign up, or learn more!

Kay June 19, 2010 at 2:18 am

about the Back to top

where do you add it in Thesis?

Reply

kay August 5, 2010 at 9:46 am

So I’ve figured it out but how do you make it slide?

Reply

Ya* June 22, 2010 at 6:52 am

Create a new widget!!
Ya*´s last blog ..Make money by uploading files!

Reply

SenseiMattKlein July 28, 2010 at 6:47 am

I like your “back to top” suggestion. I currently have a second navigation area in my footer, but this takes up valuable real estate. This post is making me re-think my strategy. Thank you.

Reply

Ian Tomlinson August 2, 2010 at 12:33 pm

Back to top link -now why didn’t I think of that!! Thanks :)
Ian Tomlinson´s last blog ..Ego states- Urges and me – part 3

Reply

Rayban August 5, 2010 at 9:45 am

how the effective way to up our PR,,,, im still need more guide from you sir

Reply

DB August 6, 2010 at 7:47 pm

Hi Alex,

How do you use the Page Numbers Plugin?

Where do you insert the code?

Reply

Gran Canaria August 6, 2010 at 8:08 pm

Specially like the No.2. Nice little thingies and details.
Of course, the backside of that is that you need to make it all compact – takes a lot more than 5 minutes – but it “plays” well and it’s worth it!

Reply

nim @ online jobs August 16, 2010 at 11:21 pm

Adding a Forum is one of my to-do list on my site, I have already added a social bookmarking buttons and will soon add more helpful plugins. Thanks for this post by the way.

Reply

TryBPO August 19, 2010 at 5:59 pm

Thank you so much you came up fruitful tips. This is so useful knowing that there is so much I can do to improve blog & to make it even better!
TryBPO´s last blog ..BPO Philippines- Indispensable Business Process Outsourcing Hub

Reply

Eleazar | Best Ways to Invest Money in the Philippines August 29, 2010 at 12:28 pm

This is a great guideline for me. This give me more reason to improve my sites in an easy way under 5 minutes. Thanks for sharing.
Eleazar | Best Ways to Invest Money in the Philippines´s last blog ..Promising and Profitable Venture for Agri-Entrepreneurs

Reply

Leave a Comment

CommentLuv Enabled

9 trackbacks