{"id":1249,"date":"2005-10-18T14:26:23","date_gmt":"2005-10-18T13:26:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2005\/10\/18\/top_10_blog_design_mistakes"},"modified":"2025-10-11T11:51:33","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T10:51:33","slug":"top_10_blog_design_mistakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2005\/10\/18\/top_10_blog_design_mistakes","title":{"rendered":"Top 10 blog design mistakes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.guardian.co.uk\/technology\/archives\/2005\/10\/17\/jakob_nielsens_top10_blog_design_mistakes.html\">Guardian Newsblog<\/a>, a guy called Jakob Nielsen has laid out a list of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.useit.com\/alertbox\/weblogs.html\">Top Ten Design Mistakes<\/a> commonly found on blogs.  I guess mine falls foul of quite a few of them: no author bio (the one that was there has gone, as I deleted the WordPress blog because it was getting heavily spammed), no picture (again, was there, now gone), headlines are not always the most descriptive, &quot;classic&quot; articles buried in the archives (again, I did have an &quot;important posts&quot; list at one stage, and got rid of it), and mixed topics (tech and religion &#8230; although they do <a href=\"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2005\/02\/09\/of_daemons_evolution_and_intol\">overlap sometimes<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I don&#39;t think that all of the points are entirely valid ones, though.  Yes, I sometimes put links in the &quot;here&quot; and &quot;here&quot; fashion, but that&#39;s usually because I want the sentence to flow and not to jar.  The problem of indiscriptive headlines, titled like a book, might be solved by blogware authors including a space for a subtitle, so that the &quot;Victims abandoned&quot; example can be extended to something more meaningful on a structured basis, like &quot;<strong>Victims Abandoned:<\/strong> how the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board leaves rape survivors high and dry&quot;.  Or something like that.  (Although you could use the &quot;Extract&quot; field for that purpose.)<\/p>\n<p>On top of this, he numbers having a weblog hosting service&#39;s domain name, and he includes TypePad among these.  TypePad isn&#39;t like Blogger &#8211; it&#39;s a service which costs nearly as much as paying for your own hosting, and unlike Blogger it offers well-structured blog presentation with organised link lists and even a photo album service.  Some of the most respected blogs use TypePad and don&#39;t hide the fact.  While it&#39;s possible that they might foist banner adverts onto their paying customers, it would defeat the whole object of having a paid-for service, which is that you pay for the service rather than an advertiser.  I&#39;d actually recommend the service to someone who wants rid of Blogger&#39;s annoyances and isn&#39;t confident enough to get hosting and install software like Movable Type or WordPress themselves.  I think an uncustomised stock theme says much more about a blogger&#39;s commitment than a TypePad location &#8211; especially since you can nearly always identify a MT or WordPress blog even if they don&#39;t advertise the fact.<\/p>\n<p>(Also, b. at Underwater Light has her <a href=\"http:\/\/underwaterlight.blogspot.com\/2005\/10\/its-early.html\">very succinct say<\/a> on the matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via Guardian Newsblog, a guy called Jakob Nielsen has laid out a list of the Top Ten Design Mistakes commonly found on blogs. I guess mine falls foul of quite a few of them:&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-k9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1249"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42761,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249\/revisions\/42761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}