AdesBlog.com

You probably wouldn’t understand what the title of this post meant, if you didn’t see the screenshot below right!? (picture says a thousands words!)

As you can see Google has been playing around with its search results. Now you can search “some” sites directly in the Google results. I liked it! Because when you go to the site, you will end up searching the site anyway :) So, why not directly search it from the Google results, right? So the Google team think, and I agree. I think it saves us at least one step.

P.S It only appears for some keywords and sites, searching for adesblog didn’t return such a result for my blog :( How about you, any of your sites has a search field on Google results?

Have you optimized your blog’s 404 Error page? Some of you may ask what is that? It’s a page that is not accessible at the time of the browsing. Reasons for the inaccessibility may vary, it can be temporary or permanent.

For example, if you delete a post, then its address becomes permanently inaccessible. When you are doing some changes to your blog, some of your posts might be temporarily inaccessible. In both cases, users who wanted to view those particular pages, would be displayed 404 Error page instead.

Optimizing your blog’s 404 page

Error Pages on most sites are usually very dull and geeky. They are not so user-friendly to non-IT users. Actually, users do not need to know what error number it is when the document cannot be found on the server. They just need to be informed in a simple human language, e.g “page not found” or “file not found” etc. They couldn’t care less if it was a 1001 error page!

Recently, some websites started to come up with creative and interesting 404 pages, particularly Twitter and Technnorati.

But there is a better way of optimizing 404 pages for blogs, instead of just having a “cute” picture of porcupine fixing your blog, instead integrate some of your interesting posts below the 404 error. At least that way, you have a better chance of retaining that (lost) visitor.

Because if he came looking for something in your blog, probably he will find your other articles interesting too!!

Where is my 404 page?

Depending on what theme you are using (default or custom), you might and might not have 404 page in your blog. However, by default WordPress’ 404 page is located inside your theme files (see below).

So, just open it and edit it in your theme editor. You can manually integrate links to some of your popular articles or you can use plugin to call your popular posts in 404 pages.

WP Plugin: 404 Notifier

Want to track how many 404 hits your blog receives every day? Sure, there is an excellent WP-Plugin called 404 Notifier by AlexKing. This plugin tracks 404 hits; where the user came from (referral url) and what page it tried to access but failed.

It can send the stats to your email or you can access the RSS feed that is generated by the plugin. Choosing RSS feed is a wise option, because email option keeps sending you notifications every time there is a 404 hit.

My blog gets about 70 hits, so guess what I found in my inbox the next day after I installed this plugin?

I wish Alex could introduce a new option; daily digest. That would be great.

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Yahoo Mail has introduced long awaited “download all attachments” feature. I had blogged about this usability issue in late 2006, then Gmail had this feature already. Download all feature is really vital when you get more than 10 attachments in the mail. It allows you to download all attachments as one zip file, rather than downloading them one by one. Because, Yahoo Mail’s popup window that scans your file before the download, makes downloading x2 more difficult. (why won’t they scan it in the background? why popup? that’s another issue altogether).

Anyway it’s still nice to have this feature in Yahoo Mail. It’s better late then never, right?

So, just continue to point out problems and request new features from the sites that you use regularly. They are might be too big to respond to the requests quickly, but still, they are listening.

* Thanks to Daniel for pointing this out.

Malaysia is gearing up for General Election soon. Yesterday mainstream newspaper NST had an article about how people in Malaysia cannot even mark the voting ballots properly. It read:

AROUND the world, a simple X is all it takes to mark the spot on a ballot paper. But just leave it to Malaysians to get a little more creative when stating their choice of candidate…

…According to Election Commission figures, there were 134,058 spoilt votes cast for state assembly seats and 165,018 for parliamentary seats in 2004.

While it may sound so simple to just mark [X] beside the desired candidate, little they know that this is actually quite confusing for people, especially the elderly.

First of all, people never use [X] for selecting something. X is used for deleting, rejecting or making something void. In everyday life, people either tick or circle the preferred choice.

I am sure this problem happens in every country, it’s just more prevalent in one country than another. Sure, Governments can teach its people how to mark [X] correctly during elections and decrease the number of spoiled votes. But the better, more sustainable solution would be to introduce a system that is usable and intuitive to all people. Because when the system is flawed, you have to constantly teach the people how to use it. That means more expenses for the Government. But if the system is replaced with a functional one, the cost would decrease and there would be less errors and less headache during each election. Maybe using “tick” would help!? Or having separate “Yes” and “No” ballot boxes, where you could throw the deserved candidates? I am sure there will be dozens of other better alternatives if one was to brainstorm.

Electrolux fails usability too

On another related topic, here is a funny review of Electrolux vacuum cleaner by a frustrated customer on Amazon. When usability issues are small, people can ignore the problem. But when the design has a major usability problem, it actually makes your life miserable. Check out the review.

I have changed my blog’s tagline from “Helping you become better blogger. Everyday, Continuously!” to… well, to the above (see below the logo. For RSS readers who can’t see the new tagline, it’s - “Blogging Tips, Entrepreneurship, Usability, Making Money Online”). It’s a generic tagline, not so unique like the previous one, but it gives an idea of what this blog is all about, especially to the new readers.

So why the change?

• First of all, I thought blogging tips niche was too narrow for me. I found, there were so many topics (articles) were left unblogged, which I wanted to blog but somehow due to my chosen niche couldn’t blog.

  Also, lately, due to my mba (exams, papers) I was not able to fulfill my promise of blogging everyday (continuously). And that’s the last thing I want to do - to NOT fulfill my promise.

• Secondly, I thought not all my readers have blogs. So they wouldn’t benefit if I keep writing about blogging only.
• Thirdly, I am quite positive that many of you want to read about Entrepreneurship, Usability, Making Money Online, Web Marketing, SEO and more.

How important is Tagline?

It’s very important. Here are some of the benefits of properly written taglines:

Usability factor: For your blog’s reader (especially to the new readers) it gives a snapshot of your blog’s content. New readers will be able to tell what topics you discuss in your blog, without going to your “about page”.

It turns new readers into regular readers: This happens when someone stumbles on a new blog that he/she has never seen before, usually it happens through Search Engines. Personally, often times I subscribed to certain blogs’ RSS this way. I would search for something in Google, find some results, find some good blog articles, look at their logo and read the tagline…. and that tagline would be the deciding factor for me to either bookmark the blog or press the small [x] button in Firefox tab.

If the tagline is something that interests me and that I can relate to, then I would subscribe to its RSS. On the other hand, if the tagline is something that is not in my interest or if it is totally missing, I wouldn’t bother to subscribe.

So, if you want to turn first-timers into regular readers, avoid “my personal ramblings” type of tagline for your blog. (Unless of course if your blog is not a niche blog).

It sets your blog a course: Your tagline is basically your mission statement, your promise to your blog readers and your niche that you have chosen to blog. Carefully crafted tagline will become your course that you will follow through. It will be your personal guideline on what to post and what not to post (deciding factor for staying on topic).

Disadvantages of a Tagline

I do not see any disadvantage of having a tagline, but I see how wrongly set (defined) tagline can have adverse affects on the blog or blogger. Like in my case, my previous tagline was not accommodating enough. So in that sense it was constraining me from blogging (growing) more.

Every blog has to decide to have a tagline at one time. SEOmoz didn’t think it needed a tagline until this post. And Problogger.net is still deciding, since 2005. How about you? Do you have a tagline?

If you are like me, have hundreds of filters in your gmail. Then you must be having this usability problem too.

I have lots of filters, some are important and some are just for organizational purposes. Some of the important ones, just because they start with a letter that are at the end of the alphabet (eg. T,S,W etc), they end up being placed at the end of the list.

And every time you want to check your gmail, you need to scroll down, if there is any email inside that filter. I usually apply “skip inbox” feature for all the emails that are placed in special filters.

Current Solution

Currently you can add symbols or numbers before your filter names and they will show up on top of the list. For example if you have Web2.0 as the filter name, normally it will show up at the end of the list, but if you add * Web2.0 or $ Web2.0 then it will climb to the top of the list. Similarly if you can add numbers like 1 Web2.0 to make it appear on top of the list.

Suggested New Feature

Why not introduce small arrows for pushing up and pushing down the filters? You click once on up arrow and the filter goes up by one position, you click once on down arrow and it goes down by one position. Simple yet effective. And most importantly it would make gmail much more usable - user friendly.

Your opinion

Do you have similar problem? If yes, how do you manage it? And in your opinion how best to solve this usability problem?

Ping: gmailblog.blogspot.com (I am gonna ping gmail blog, so that they will take note of this post, hopefully).