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Friday, 11 January 2013

Blogging Essentials: 3 Things To Make Your Blog More User-Friendly & Accessible | Guest Post Miss Drifted Snow White

The first few #bblogger chat topics on Twitter were always along similar lines – how to improve your blog to get more readers, etc. As a former web designer, developer and consultant, I thought I put a little guide together of what I think bloggers should do to make their website better accessible and more user-friendly.
image source: weheartit.com
1. Mobile Template – faster loading times, less data.
Whether you're on Blogger or Wordpress, you can see from your stats that a large proportion of visitors views your blog on their mobile devices, so on 3G. Which means blogs take ages to load. If you then don't enable mobile templates so that instead of loading a 'lite' version the entire blog is being loaded, it eats your reader's data as well as their time. Which is counterproductive, since people who access websites on their mobile devices are CLEARLY on the go. Yes, there is of course the issue of look & feel of the blog in mobile view, BUT firstly, if you enable mobile view and your readers don't like it, they can always manually themselves change it to the full view, and secondly, people who access your blog on the go surely don't wanna see the advertisement – they come for the content, your articles, and they are displayed perfectly fine.

2. Resizing Images – faster loading times, more storage.
We all know that good photography has a great impact – readers want to see fresh and pretty pictures. But what most people forget is that their cameras take pictures that are individually 3MB big (sometimes more, sometimes less). They edit the pictures and upload them straight away. So each visitor has to download those 3MB per picture. Imagine you include 5 images, that's 15MB to download which even on broadband takes time, and on mobile devices even more! So make sure to resize your images – I resize my images to about 700px wide. That's more than enough! Unless you want someone else to be able to PRINT your images onto an A4 format, you don't need to upload it bigger than your text-area is. Plus, this saves you A LOT of storage on Blogger. 1 picture of 3MB or 15 pictures of 200KB. Makes a difference, doesn't it? Loads a lot faster too if your 5 images are suddenly only 200KB rather than 3MB. I use Photoscape (which is free) that allows batch-resizing.

3. Font Style & Contrast – easier readable
There are a lot of blogs that require me to squint my eyes or zoom into their text to be able to read what they've written. Make your font size a good size, the font itself not too fancy (ask yourself whether you'd enjoy reading a book in the font that you want to choose) and most importantly in the right colour. If you have a light background, you want a dark font colour, if you have a dark background you want a light colour. There's a great tool online where you can enter the colours you want to pick and see whether they will work or not.

I hope you found this guide helpful. There are a few more blog posts on my blog about how to improve your blog photography, etc.

Maria Herchenbach // Miss drifted Snow White
web: www.missdriftedsnowwhite.com
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Labels: Blogging Essentials, Guest Post

13 comments:

  1. 11 January 2013 at 09:09

    Mobile optimized sites are a big yes in my books, I hate having to wait for a full site to load and then messing about with the zoom so I can read it x

    Reply
  2. 11 January 2013 at 09:27

    I didnt even know you could change it for mobiles!!! Definitely doing that when I get home! X

    Reply
  3. meneksh11 January 2013 at 10:37

    This is super helpful! I'm such a n00b about anything webby, so I'm loving reading posts about better blogging :) I'm with Soph, had no idea you could change it for mobiles! x

    Reply
  4. 11 January 2013 at 11:16

    Great tip about the mobile template :) i was wondering how to be able to change the font used on your blog to something other than the fonts google provide..? xx

    Reply
  5. 11 January 2013 at 11:31

    oh thanks for sharing these helpful tips! i really like posts like this.

    Reply
  6. 11 January 2013 at 11:48

    I always edit my pictures on PicMonkey but never resize them. I'm checking out all my pictures now to see how big they are!

    Lx

    Reply
  7. 11 January 2013 at 13:42

    Great post, thank you! Esp the part about mobile viewing!

    Reply
  8. 11 January 2013 at 14:53

    This is a lovely post, thank you :) xx

    seeking--serendipity.blogspot.com

    Reply
  9. 11 January 2013 at 15:17

    Very helpful! I never even considered resizing my pictures, but hopefully will in the future- thankyou! xx

    Reply
  10. 11 January 2013 at 17:44

    Ooo def gonna change for mobile viewing didn't know this!!

    Reply
  11. 11 January 2013 at 21:39

    Very helpful - thanks! At first I was like 'ooh 2 out of 3 of these things have to be a cup of tea and biscuits?!' - always a treat when reading blogs ;) haha.
    Charlotte xox
    www.somethingspecialtosay.blogspot.co.uk

    Reply
  12. Vicki12 January 2013 at 20:34

    Oooo fab tips. I need to resize my images more. As I know I get frustrated waiting for pages to load. I really like your blog design.

    Reply
  13. Dwarka Expressway project13 January 2013 at 09:31

    hi this is nice post...

    Reply

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