AdesBlog.com

Recommended answer for most of the blogs is resounding “No”. Why? Because it’s difficult to get it right, news (or magazine) type of blog themes can get very messy, if not implemented properly. Implementation here means, visually arranging different parts of the blog in a way that, it will not confuse the reader.

Probably one of the better examples of good implementation of such design is, Darren’s blog www.problogger.net. And not so good implementation example is, Ian’s blog www.ianfernando.com. Ian has a good blog, but I am not a fan of his layout. (Sorry Ian!). When I first saw it, it was kind of overwhelming… I am sure many new visitors feel the same.

Another reason why you should NOT use news themes on your blog is (let me quote myself):

People are used to reading blogs in sequential (downward) manner, from one post to another. Putting posts here and there will just confuse the readers, especially new visitors who are not familiar with your blog layout.
- Ades

So, unless you have thought out usable “news theme” layout for your blog, it’s better not to use them.

Do you know of any other blogs that use “news themes”? Maybe you can give “good” and “not so good” implementation examples?

I have talked about Gmail’s loading… message, and how it used to block the Logout link here.

With the new version of Gmail, that usability issue has been corrected. Now the loading… message appears in the middle as was suggested (see screenshot below). Unfortunately, delete_&_next feature is yet to be introduced.

The new version of Gmail is not that different from the older version. In fact, you won’t notice much about the changes. What is noticeable though is the improved loading time, now it seems to load a lot faster.

Gmail, how about “unread” marking for individual emails in the long thread?

In Gmail, when you email to each other back and forth, it will turn into a long conversation thread. There are times, when you open the email and then mark it “unread” back for later reading. The reasons can vary, maybe the email is too long, maybe you are rushing…etc

But there is a slight usability problem with this “unread” marking feature. When you mark the thread “unread”, it will mark the whole thread (not the last email). And when you later open that particular thread, it will display you the first email in the thread. Shouldn’t it display the last one logically? Anyway, that’s not what I am getting at…

What I want is, ability to mark any specific email, be it separate email or the one that is inside a long conversation thread. So you can mark any email “unread” for example. And when you click on that particular marked thread, it will display the “unread” message (not the first email in the thread). It would be very convenient. Because this way, you could get to the email that you want from the first click.

Because if you are like me, then you know that scrolling long threads is no fun… ;) I rarely use the “end” button on the keyboard to go to the end of the page.

So Gmail team, anybody there…? Can we expect these changes in the new version of Gmail? Ping ping ping: gmailblog.blogspot.com… I hope someone is listening.

Update: “loading” issue has been resolved

If you didn’t login to your Skype account, then next time you visit Skype.com, expect to solve the puzzle of finding your login box. There is no login box on the main page, and there is no direct link to login page either. So what’s up with that? I guess they want people to concentrate on the new products they are offering, by hiding the login box and making people’s life miserable.

After scanning through the main page, you will click on the “Already have Skype?” link. You expect this link to give you a login page. But unfortunately, after clicking you feel like you have returned to homepage back.

But it’s not a homepage. After spending some time looking around on this page (I think they want you to think! But Steve Krug begs to differ in his book “Don’t Make Me Think!“), you will notice that, there is an additional link called “Account” on the menu.

Only after clicking this link, will it take you to login page. Phew! What a long journey to find this page. I am not sure if they are converting any customers to their new products, but what I am sure is that they are frustrating a lot of customers.

Login box should be on the homepage!

Next time you visit, it does have cookies and will take you to the second page which has “Account” link on the menu. But from the first glance, you won’t notice that link either. Because most of the people are looking for the word “Login” and not “Account”.

But I personally think, sites like Skype.com need to put the login box on the homepage. Because most of the people who have skype account want to login to their account. Imagine gmail hiding its login box and pushing you adsense and adwords products!?

According to Jakob Nielsen, dialog controls including tabs are most of the time used wrongly.

The biggest penalty goes to Amazon.com. Because he says tabs should be used to alternate between views within the same context, and not to navigate to different areas — a common mistake introduced by Amazon.com.

He cites Yahoo Finance in the article as the example that uses the tabs correctly (most of the time).

Another mistake that he mentions is, having more than one row of tabs.

Multiple rows create jumping UI elements, which destroy spatial memory and thus make it impossible for users to remember which tabs they’ve already visited.

I see this problem on some softwares, especially in the “preferences” window. Usually there will be 2 to 3 rows, containing so many tabs and when you click the tabs, not only the tab but the whole row will come to the front. This makes it very confusing to use the user interface.

He also talks about 13 Design Guidelines for using tabs correctly. The article is worth reading, especially for User Interface designers. Read the full article here.

Gmail has a usability problem with its ajax loading… message, it covers the “logout” button and makes it difficult to click on it.

You can still click on the logout button while it’s loading, but you need to make some real effort to do that. You have to click that 1 pixel edge of “logout” button which is barely visible beneath the loading… message.

It’s true that we can just wait for the message to be gone and only then click the logout button. However, sometimes, when there is a problem with internet connection or when the connection is slow, the loading message would not go so easily. In fact, there are times it will just stay like that - frozen, until you refresh it again.

I hope guys over at Gmail can solve this usability issue soon.

According to Jacob Nielsen’s latest study, banner blindness is apparently getting worse. And he says that unethical way of advertising gets better results than normal advertising. For example, study found that flashing banners with fake “close” and “OK” buttons got more clicks than normal banners. These are banners that mimic the system error notifications.

Heatmaps from eyetracking studies: The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations. Green boxes were drawn on top of the images after the study to highlight the advertisements.

Solution: Ad blending

According to the study results, blending an ad to the content (and making it more like a part of content rather than ad) works better than displaying the ads as ads. I think everybody knows that by now already, because everybody is doing it in Google AdSense.

However it also suggests that blending it too much, might actually hurt your business in the long run.

A specific ad may or may not be ethical, depending on how closely it masquerades as content. I caution against going too far, because it can backfire and mislead users. Unethical ads will get you more fixations, but ethical business practices will attract more loyal customers in the long run.

The study also suggests that advertising through ad networks (e.g Google AdWords, TribalFusion..etc) is less effective than advertising directly on the desired website. Because the banners get less fixation (i.e less people will look at them because of the banner blindness) when advertised through ad networks.

I kind of agree with this, with ad networks it’s very easy to waste your money in a second and get no results. You can easily get few hundred times of banner impression but it’s possible that you get only a hand full of clicks. That said, you can read the full article at www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html

If you are a regular blogger and if you have blogged for a year or more, chances are great that you must have faced or thought about this problem already. And that is, how to solve “burried-posts” problem? Different people have tried to address this issue differently, in this post I will list some of the widely used solutions for this problem. I will also include the solutions that I have implemented myself.

If you are a new blogger, then you should consider this issue in your long term plan. And you have to choose which solutions you will be using for your blog. Because when you have too many posts, it will be a lot more difficult to implement new strategies.

Solutions for Burried Posts

1. More Categories

When you have more categories on your blog, users will be able to read a topic of interest as specific as possible. And that will save time for the user from reading unrelated or unnecassary posts. I am using this strategy on my blog, currently I have over 40 categories. I personally think more categories is the most important solution that should be used regardless.

2. Related Posts

Another solution is “related posts links” that appear on every post of your blog. This can be done by WP Plugins, I am using this plugin (I was informed that the link is not working at the moment, hope he will restore it soon) for my blog. This plugin allows you to search and select the related posts for your any given post manually, this plugin gives you greater control than the automatic plugins. Because here, you decide what posts to show, and that results in more accurate “related posts”.

Automatic plugins work the other way around, they will select the related posts automatically and display them on the fly, without your intervention. You just activate the plugin and relax. One advantage of automatic plugins is, they are dynamic. That means all the new posts will be automatically indexed and included in the related links. This cannot be done in manual plugins, you have to update the “related links” every time you post something related.

You should decide what suits your need best.

3. Most Read/Popular Posts

There are plugins that can keep track of the visitors to each page and show the most 10 popular posts (you can set to anything, not just 10) and display them as a separate page or right on the homepage.

However this Popular Posts solution has a drawback. Since most of the time it’s determined by the visits to the particular post, it might give an undesired result. For example a post that has only one link to some site might get dugg! and since it will have the most number of visits, it will show up on your Most Popular posts page.

Surely you would want users to read your other interesting articles than an empty post with just a link to other site?

4. Interesting Archives

This one is my own invention that I have implemented on this blog. Basically I have handpicked some of the posts that I think will be interesting to my readers, and hard-coded them into the blog’s theme. They appear on the footer of the blog.

I am also thinking to make them random, that way I will be able to display more posts.

5. Creating eBook from the old posts

Some people like JohnChow have created an eBook from their old posts. I think it’s a great idea. This would be possible for bloggers who are blogging about particular topic most of the time. Since JC is talking about Making Money Online, he could create a Make Money Online eBook. So if you have your own niche, then you can start thinking about your new eBook.

6. Creating Tag Clouds

Creating Tag Clouds on your blog can be a great idea for blog navigation. It can also help the new reader to quickly visualize what topics do you talk the most, and what’s your expertise. If your tag called “Ramblings” is so big compared to… let’s say “Make Money” then probably you will end up loosing the new readers ;)

7. Most Commented Posts

Most Commented Posts plugins can help you to promote your most popular posts in different way. They display the Top10 most commented/discussed posts of your blog.

Again there is a downside for this, for example if an argument breaks out between the readers and they end up comment-fight each other in the comments section of the post, that post will show up on your homepage. And this post might not be the most useful post for your readers.

How about you?

My question to you reader-bloggers is, how have you addressed this issue? What kind of solution you have implemented so far? I think it would be useful to all of us to know more solutions for this issue, especially to the ones who have just started blogging.

Updated: This post has been updated from the readers suggestions. Thanks to Travis and Spud.

This is a nice javascript that makes the date field (any date field) usable. All you need to do is to click inside the form field, and the calendar will pop-up for you to select the date. If you have any forms (e.g online booking, delivery service etc) be sure to use this kind of javascript.

It’s compatible with all major browsers:

• IE6, IE7
• Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0
• Safari

Download available at the site. calendar.swazz.org

Sometimes when I come across a good website, I contact the owner of the website for advertisement opportunities. Be it regarding paid reviews or banner advertisements on their site. In some cases, they reply late. If you are lucky, you get a reply the next day. But in some cases you get a reply only after few days, and yet in some cases you get a reply after few weeks.

Usually the email would contain info about the advertisement options and its rates. But the difficulty arises when the site owner does not include a link to his website. Not in the body of the email, nor in the signature. (It’s worse when they use free email like yahoo or gmail, because you can’t trace their site from the email address.)

Most of the time, if the rates and stats sound attractive I would respond back, and ask for the website URL. But if the rates are just normal or expensive, I don’t bother to reply. Who knows, maybe if he had included a link I would have bought an ad… looking at the site might have influenced my decision.

The point
Don’t make the mistake of sending emails without your site or blog’s URLs. Especially when you are replying to an email, that is asking for advertisement opportunities. Better yet, include all your URLs in the signature of all outgoing emails. That’s what I do.

Often times, I find myself reading my emails (Gmail) then I want to delete it and go directly to the next one. Unfortunately this is not possible in Gmail. So I have to delete the email, and Gmail would take me back to my Inbox and from there I have to click on the next email to read the contents.

I believe this usability problem could be avoided by just introducing one more button “delete and next” inside the email page. When pressed it would delete the current email and go directly to the next, without going back to Inbox.

Did you notice this usability issue with your Gmail? Or is there a workaround for this that I don’t know? Please let me know if there is.