… alias 10 advices about what to do and what no to do on your blog if you care about having a little corner in the web clean and comfortable for your visitors.

What I’m going to tell are just simple advices and are not a bible, so feel free to disagree with me and manage your blog as you prefere.
By the way it’s sometimes a good idea to put ourselves in visitors’ shoes and image how a potential reader could feel like visiting our little home in the web.
So the goal of his little guide is to give some quick and simple advices to increase usability of your blog in order to make visitors feel good while reading your blog .. and why not? Make him come back again and again

1. Check cross browser compatibility of your blog
2. Kill pop-ups!
3. Moderate colors!
4. Choose the right font size
5. Music or not?
6. Make links visible
7. Images : little and light
8. Use standard fonts
9. Beware of animated gif
10. Try to put yourself in your readers’ shoes

1. Check cross browser compatibility of your blog
Ok this is the very first step.
You made your template or you just picked up one ready made, you personalized it with care adding all the gadgets and things you wanted to and now your blog looks gorgeus!
But … did you check it also on other browsers? Are you sure that if your blog looks perfect on Internet Explorer it also looks the same on Firefox?
This is an habit that everyone (web designers and bloggers) should have but in the reality I see a lot of blog all messed up just because no one really worried about checking them with a few different browsers.
Fortunately IE is not the only browser in the web but there are dozen of other browsers that unfortunaltely render in different ways the HTML code.
That the reason why a blog or a site can look perfect on IE and at the same time can look like a bomb was dropped in when visiting it with another browser.
This lack of compatibility can make you lose a lot of potential readers that’s why , after modifying your template or after creating a new one , it’s necessary to check it with most browsers as possible.
If you haven’t the chance to make it on your pc there are some website that can give you some help like Browsershot or Browsercam.
So check them out…now you have no more excuses!

2. Kill pop-ups!
Nothing can be more painful than visiting a blog or a site and find yourself fighting against dozen of pop-up windows popping out form everywhere.
This could be sometimes a good reason to leave a site behind and never come back again.
Even if today a lot of browsers have some pop-up blockers integrated or even if you can find external pop-up killer softwares around the web, they cannot be sometimes enough to keep your screen completely free.
That’s why you should always be very careful about what you put into your blog because some little software and services like:

• tagboards
• users online counters
• web statistics counters

can bring you a lot of undesired presents…
So when you are looking for some services like this pay attention to choose one that is completely ad-free!

3. Moderate colors!
While surfing around the web I saw a lot of times blogs that could have been very interesting but I couldn’t read them .. because of the flashing/blinking/blurry colors.
Sometimes people choose colors matches without thinking about how they make the blog look like when trying to read it.
For example making a violet-flashing green-yellow-pink template can seem a very cool and in-fashion idea but it could also make your blog quite illegible.
A lack of contrast between background color and text (example : white background and yellow text) or too much contrast (example : green background and red text) can make reading very difficult and painful for some people, that’s why you always need to find a right contrast between colors and text.
If you feel confused about picking the right colors just take a look at one of the thousand CSS showcase websites around, I’m sure you’ll find the right inspiration.

4. Choose the right font size
Have you ever find any blog or site with the text so tiny that can’t be even read?
Well I have.
People who choose to use extra small font maybe don’t think about how it render on different resolutions : a 10px font size can be still readable on low resolutions like 800*600 but it surely kill reader’s eyes on high resolutions like 1280*1024 (and today a lot of people use this kind of resolutions!).
Moreover different font type act in different ways : try typing a 10px verdana font and then try typing 10px georgia font.
They use the same measures but they don’t look big at the same way.
So it’s quite simple now to image that using different fonts and differents size for every post isn’t that good idea, it surely doesn’t help readers.
Some of you can say that daddy Gates thought about a simple command in the browser that allow you to change font size on the screen, so why bothering about font size?
Be honest: would you change font size manually everytime you try to read a blog with extra tiny text?
So in order to make life easier for everybody a medium font size (11px and higher for example) is the best choice..think about it.

5. Music or not?
As I am a huge music lover I would answer yes, yes and the yes again.
Music is awesome and it’s very relaxing surfing around the web listening to some good music, but sometimes a lot of people think to welcome readers on their blogs with some music background. Nothing bad about it you’ll say.
But what about if your reader is already listening at his favourite songs? And what about if other 2 or 3 blogs opened in the tabs put some music on too? The answer is : you have a real hell in your ears!
Moreover think about one thing : if you use a quicktime/windowsmedia player for just one song it could be take some time to load the MP3 and so the whole loading of the page could go very slow.
So the right thing to do should be offering the chance to readers to enjoy the music you love with an audio player but without any auto start of the music.
I personally suggest to use the radioblog or something similar as audio player since it allows you to have a real playlist (so not only one song) and it doesn’t affect the loading time of the site.
And happy music for everyone!

6. Make links visible
It could be very obvious but a lot of people just don’t care about this little/big particular : trying to read a blog where links are indentical to the normal text make the reading very painful. Not everybody has time to guess where the links are in the middle of a post.
So if you see that links on your blog are quite difficult to see just go in the CSS code of your template and modify those values a:link and a:hover changing their colors into something more visible.
They manage the looking of the clickable links and the status of the links when you move the mouse over them.
And if you just don’t want to change colors due to the esthetics of your blog, you can always simply add some decoration like single underlines, double, dotted and whatever else in order to differentiate them form the rest of the text.
If you don’t know how to do it read this little guide I found on internet, it could be very useful.

7. Images : little and light
One of the most funny thing to do on blogs is to personalize them with images and usually the first image to be changed is the header one.
Nothing bad .. unless to just put one so big and heavy that fills up the entire screen and takes ages to load!
An image tall 500-600px just fills up the whole screen on low resolutions like 800*600 and about 3/4 of the screen on a medium resolution like 1024*768 and it could hide the most important thing a reader looks for at first glance in a blog : the content!
On the other hand using too much big images in the posts can break out the template you’re using which couldn’t be designed to host images so big (read : if the sidebar width is 250px is not a good idea to put an image large 330px).
Above all let’s consider the bigger is the images the bigger will be the loading time of the image itself.
So a few advices about it could be:
1)try not to use too much big images. Don’t use header images that are taller than 400px and beware of the width that shouldn’t exceed the columns width.
2)use light images. Don’t put in the header images bigger than 500kb (bigger images can always be adjusted using programs like photoshop or paint shop pro).

8. Use standard fonts
A lot of people has been asking me about using or not special fonts on their blog.
The answer at first is “of course” … but then I always add “..but I don’t recommend it”.
Fonts like verdana, arial, courier or georgia are all standard family font that are preinstalled in our pc and they are always rendered correctly on every site on every browser.
But if we download a non standard font and we use it on our blog the rendering is no more easy like before.
In order to view correctly the font you choose every visitor on your blog should have that font installed on his pc and if he doesn’t ..well the cute and magic font won’t appear as you’d like but insted of it the reader will see a standard font. end of the games.
So since our goal is not to make people download font just for our blog (people want to relax reading our blog, people don’t want to work for it!) so don’t make the mistake to ask people to download stuff just and only for your blog. They won’t do it) the most simple thing to do is to use standard fonts!

9. Beware of animated gif
Animated gif are funny, I know. They blink, they move, sometimes they are very artistic and well done.
But please don’t overdo! Adding a dozen of animated gif on your blog ins’t a good idea thanks to 3 little reasons:
1) they usually are more heavy than simple jpf images and they weigh down the entire page, so loading time could increase.
2) since, as I said, they usually are quite heavy they could also weigh down even the scrolling up and down of the page.
3) maybe the most important thing : they move and so they keep the attention of the reader’s eyes away from the content (which should be the first thing!)
So use animated gif but with moderation!

10. Try to put yourself in your readers’ shoes
Last but not least!
When you create a template or you just modify it try to think about how a potential visitor could feel like visiting and reading your blog.
We all know that we first write and manage our blog for ourselves but let’s remember that if we open a blog, our second and immediate goal is to make people read our blog, enjoy our blog and possibily make people come back again!
So don’t make the mistake of thinking that if you like the look of your blog then everyone will like and will find it comfortable but try to take a look at it as if you were a visitor thinking that everyone has different needs and different taste.
With some little changes and tiny modifications you’ll be able to make everyone feel good while reading your blog and first person who will enjoy good feedback it will be you