Website Usability and Web 2.0
Website usability has been changed dramatically with the addition of Web 2.0 and social network marketing sites coming into the mainstream. I have been getting a lot of heat lately over some of my website usability posts, especially the one about keeping content above the fold. Sure I admit that this isn’t as significant when you are talking about blogs, but don’t think that people are going to be scrolling on your site looking for specific products or other information. The fact is you have to lay out your site so that the content and information that make you money is put right in front of your visitors.
I have looked at hundreds of Google Analytics site overlays since I wrote that post and links that are further down on the page just don’t get clicked on with any regularity. This also has a lot to do with the fact that most of my clients had me design their site or work closely with their designers. I stick to the website usability rules I learned in reading Jakob Nielsen’s books because they have always and still do work for me.
Usability and Social Network Marketing Web 2.0 Websites
For most of us social network marketing and Web 2.0 mean blogs and blogging systems. I use WordPress as my platform of choice and have had a great deal of success. I am running a couple of TypePad sites now to test another system, but so far I still think WordPress is the best.
Most website usability rules get thrown out the window just in the very nature of blogs. They are long and require a lot of scrolling. If you look at my blog you can see that I don’t use the more option and don’t use summaries on the home page. Most people believe that summaries are the way to go, but I wanted to run a test. My blog was set up on the same day as I set up one of my data recovery clients blogs. They both are updated frequently and they run different types of set ups. The reason for this is so I can have an opinion that is based upon facts, not conjecture.
The statements that I make about usability are also based upon facts and statistics. I know that everyones website is different, but the most basic rules of usability should still be followed. When you are creating a blog, it looks very clean and easy to follow the first couple of months. The issues start when you are 6 months into the blog and have hundreds of posts. If you don’t properly plan out your blog, it will be very hard for your visitors to find stuff. I use some good plugins that help me keep the site organized and are trying out a few new ones.
At SES in San Diego there was a lot of talk about tagging, Ultimate Tag Warrior and tag clouds. At this time I use the Technorati tagging system because I have concerns about duplicate content and actually have the /tag/ folder disallowed in my robots.txt file. I still think that UTW is a good idea and I am implementing it on a few other sites. As Web 2.0 gets older, website usability plugins will become more prevalent. I am in the process of a major overhaul of this site including a theme change. I will keep all of you apprised of what I have learned and I will explain why I am setting the site up the way I am. The first thing I did was change my permalink structure. This was and still is a major pain in the ass, but it had to be done. You can read about it in my changing the permalinks on an existing site post.
Related Posts:
5 website usability rules that won’t ever change
Web 2.0 Explained
Website usability and the Home Page
