Weblog Top Ten Mistakes

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Jakob Nielsen published his list of the most common mistakes of weblog authors concerning the usability of their blogs: The Top Ten Design Mistakes.

  1. No Author Biographies
  2. No Author Photo
  3. Nondescript Posting Titles
  4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go
  5. Classic Hits are Buried
  6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
  7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
  8. Mixing Topics
  9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
  10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

So much about this list, and I am aware of the fact that the MikeSchnoor.com does not conform with the first two issues so far. I believe it is important to reveal a little bit about yourself as an author, and in order to meet that small and simple criteria, I’m going to post my biography and some fancy picture in the About section.

However, the problem with having words linked like „here“ or „click“ as seen in the third issue doesn’t happen at all on this site. Usually it is quite easy for a reader to understand that links created by myself lead to that what they are targeted at.

The fourth issue of posting a list of the top articles in a blog is useful, and I might do this in the near future. Fortunately I don’t even use a calendar for its horrible usability. But I’m not sharing Nielsen’s opinion about mixing topics or posting irregularly. I do prefer to mix topics since I cover many issues on this blog. For this, the four major categories (shown on top of the site) combine the others which are seen as the „big list“ in the sidebar. And how can one expect to judge content by posting only if there’s time for blogging? If you have other things to do, this is more imperative than covering the show in your blog. Thus this is a problem which is aimed directly at corporate or professional bloggers who post once a week.

The question about your future boss is always important – never forget that one may like to hire you and become offended from your writing. But one may never forget that a flame war in your blog is different from a critical opinion and thought. If I have a problem with the fictional Company X, and I get hired from that company after two years, the company should accept that employees with critical opinions are more valuable than the simple digest that oyu can find on the street.

Last but not least, we do have a domain name here – or you wouldn’t read us at all, or not? ;)

/von