Designing Blogs for Readers

Let us say there are only three kinds of readers, the First Timer, the Occasional Browser, and the Subscriber. Current blog designs favor the Subscriber; the Subscriber always reads the posts as they come out, they are always up-to-date, and never have to dip in to the archives. We've done a good job catering to this kind of reader, but the other two seem to be left out in the cold, and the odd thing about this is every Subscriber was at first a mere First Timer; they either dredged through the archives and caught themselves up, or decided to skip the archives altogether, but at one point they were brand new (and some were there from day one).

The First Time and the Occasional Browser have much the same needs, so much so it may not be worth separating them. The difference is one of purpose, motive, and interest. The First Timer is mostly curious; he wants to know what the blog is about, what the author writes about, and wants to get an idea of the style of writing. The First Timer is most likely to read through the archives, maybe even starting with post number one, but will probably be reading a few posts in sequence. The Occasional Browser on the other hand is someone who comes back to the site when he thinks of it and reads anything he can recognize as new (or just interesting). The chances are good the Occasional Browser will dip into archives, and will probably read a few posts in sequence. Keeping these two types of readers in mind there are some things which could be done to current blogs to help them.

Since both of these users will likely interact with the archives it seems a likely place to begin. As I talked about in Suggestion for All Blogs the archives are often backwards. We write and make posts in chronological order, and I daresay more than just a few of us will build upon what has come before; we may not directly reference a previous post, we may only build upon the ideas as have been published. It is perplexing then to go into date based archives and find them in reverse chronological order. As a new reader they might want to know what happened in a given month, and more than likely they'll want to start reading at the beginning of the month and work their way to the end, not vice versa. This is not such a big issue when it comes to category or topic archives, and in fact it might be best there to have the most recent article at the top; it would be ideal to allow the user to sort them as he so chooses.

The next area we need tot look at is navigation. For someone who reads things as they are published navigating the site isn't a concern. Even should they want to re-read a certain article they will likely search for it, or at the very least they will be able to search for it since they have read it and know what to search for. However, there are some egregious navigation omissions which are simple and trivial to address but which allow a reader to move from article to article with ease and without feeling lost.

The first thing seems so simple it's amazing Blogger has missed it. Every individual article should have a “Previous”, “Home”, and “Next” navigational link. Since these things are published in a sequential and chronological manner, it makes sense to link them thus. And yet whenever I find myself reading an article on Blogger posted sometime in the past I can't go onto the next article. I can see the previous entries, but not the next ones. It's shocking, it's surprising, it's downright weird. Blogger hosts a great number of blogs, and were it not so I'd let his pass, but discovering a new blog which has good material in its archive is hard to read when you cannot move onto the next article.

The second point is the archives themselves. Most blogs will put the full content (or an excerpt) on the archive page in question, and yet they don't supply a list of the titles. If you happen to find yourself reading a particular verbose author and you happen to look into the archives you'll have to spend many moments scrolling to find a headline that interests you. It should be little trouble to provide a list of the headlines off to one side so readers can jump to a particular article.

My final point is one not often encountered, and even when encountered it is not such a big deal as to make a fuss over it, but it still is a navigational issue that will please your readers. When you have an article that is a part of a larger whole, say a “Part 2” each article in the series should have a Table of Contents linking them all together. It's a simple thing, a small matter, but when it comes to reading it's nice to know you can just jump to the next one in the series and not wonder if the “Next” link will be the next part, or some pictures of your cat dressed for tea.

There is one final point I could make, but this one will help a portion of the Subscriber crowd. If you provide an RSS feed (and if you don't you should) you will serve your RSS readers by making sure they don't miss anything should they happen to go away for the weekend. Granted, most blogs do not update so often as to push new content out of the feed in only a day or two, but should that happen the feeds should be based by date or by number, whichever contains the largest number of posts (i.e. four days worth of articles or 10 articles, whichever is greater). This will allow your readers to take a three day weekend vacation and not worry about checking their feeds.