5 Easy Blog Improvements in under 5 Minutes

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

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

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:

• 16 Stun­ning Mootools scripts for enhanc­ing your html forms
• Pret­tier Acces­si­ble Forms
• Web Form Design Pat­terns: Sign-Up Forms
• Web Form Design Pat­terns: Sign-Up 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

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