12 Startling Design Considerations For Your Blog

You probably read many blogs, books and other content that tells you how to build a great blog. Often this advice is contradictory! The opinions of bloggers are based on their experiences and what works for them. This blog included! So it’s refreshing to find some real empirical evidence that can tell us how people read websites, how they look for information, what attracts their eyes, and how they navigate pages.

This is the research called Eyetrack III  .

Believe me, you will find the results of this research an amazing eye-opener. You just got to read it!

I’ve extracted what I think are the 12 most interesting statements from the research (below) which gives us tips on how to design our blog’s content, templates and layout. 

Read the report…. does your blog fit to what the research suggests? (Wait… I betta check this one does too!)

Here are the 12 best bits:

1. “Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page”
2. “A headline has less than a second of a site visitor’s attention”
3. “The bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it”
4. “Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best”
5. “For headlines — especially longer ones — it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers”
6. “Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones”
7. “The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right”
8. “We found that ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations”
9. “Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior…. larger type promotes lighter scanning”
10. “Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen”
11. “Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen”
12. “Our research also shows that clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages”

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How To Exorcise the Curse of Comment Spam

Comment Spam is a Pain in the Ass.

It consumes time and energy just dealing with it - that is - reviewing each comment and deciding if it spam, and then tagging it as spam.

If you’ve suffered it, you’ll know what I mean.

Thankfully, there is a Wordpress plugin that removes 99% of spam - Akismet (http://akismet.com/  ).

So first of all, if you don’t have Akismet, then install it today. This will cure the burden of this problem. Download the plugin, place it (unzipped) into your plugins folder, and then enabled it in your plugins manager. That’s all you need to do (well, except upgrade it when Wordpress tells you there is an update.)

Akismet stops, on average, 150 spam comments on my blogs, EVERY DAY!

Next, if you don’t have comment moderation enabled, then you really must do, immediately. You don’t want spam finding it’s way through and making the hard work of your blog a mockery.

There is more. Don’t forget that once you approve a comment, the commentator can add more comments without you needing to approve them!

Some spammers are clever. They write comments that are not blatant spam, but instead give you a compliment or incentivize you to approve the spam. Doing so opens doors for a follow up of spam!

My advice is, if in doubt, don’t approve. Mark it as spam.

The signs of a potential spammer are:

• The commentator addresses you as ‘webmaster’
• You’re given a compliment without it specifically saying why
• You’re offered link-backs
• Very generic comment that could apply to any blog

Something else to try. Take the body of the comment you have doubts about, and Google it. Search for the comment, and use quotes around the comment (so that Google searches for the whole string, not just the component parts.)

Here is an example.

Today I received this comment on my blog:

Hello webmaster
I would like to share with you a link to your site

write me here xxxxxx@mail.ru (full email address edited)

Now I do a search on Google using “Hello webmaster I would like to share with you a link to your site write me here xxxxxx@mail.ru

What did I find?

I found 10 sites with this comment for all to see! That’s 10 blogs without comment moderation, or possibly naive bloggers.

Preventing comment spam is a cinch once you have the tools and some wisdom to hand. Don’t let these scumbags destroy our livelihoods!

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Inaugral Post

Wow! This is my first post… the slate is clean! If you’ve been blogging for a while then you’ll know how weird it feels writing a first post again.

Welcome

If I am lucky to have landed readers at this stage, then welcome! Check out my About Page as to why I’ve started startup-blogger.com.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be talking about the best ways to startup a blog, blogging ‘tracks’, and blogging passion.

Stay tuned!

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