5 Easy Blog Improvements in under 5 Minutes

Alex — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:00:12 +0000

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:

Back to top

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.

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.

Blogussion » simple