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Part 3c - Business Blog Design and Usability

How your blog is designed and arranged will determine how easy (or how difficult) it is for people to use. The same is true of websites in general. The easier a blog or website is for people to use, the more likely they will be to stick around.

Remember the series of transformations we are striving for here. We want to turn visitors into readers, and readers into customers.

Most business blogs are created around a certain objective. This objective usually involves visitors taking some form of action — reading, clicking, subscribing, downloading, purchasing, etc.

You can increase the chance people will perform the desired action by making it very easy for them to do so. In web terminology this is known as usability, and it has everything to do with your business blogging success.

Improving Your Blog's Usability

1. Limit the number of posting categories to reduce confusion. Most business blogs can get by with a handful of categories, if they've been properly planned out. More than ten categories on a blog, and you begin to create an information-overload situation.
2. Add links to the blog's home page, "About" page and "Contact" page (when applicable). Regardless of where somebody enters your blog, they should be able to find the Home page to get oriented, the About page to learn the blog's purpose, and the Contact page for obvious reasons.
3. If you want people to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed, create a "subscribe" button and link it to a page that explains RSS feeds, the benefits they offer, and how people can use them. It might be a good idea to include a subscribe-by-email option as well. You can get a free RSS-to-email program from a company like Zookoda, and there are many paid versions as well. (More on this later!)
4. Reduce clutter any way you can. Some business blogs have so many RSS buttons, graphics, advertisements, and other bells and whistles that they become an absolute mess. You can avoid this by cleaning up your sidebar area, using a supplemental menu area when necessary, grouping things logically, and removing anything that doesn't need to be there.
5. Conduct a simple usability test. Ask a friend or colleague to visit your blog, and see how quickly they can (A) find the main menu, (B) determine the blog's theme and purpose, (C) find contact information, etc.

Usability Conclusion

When it comes to business blogs, usability has a direct impact on profitability. Keep you blog clean and easy to read. Web readers and researches are skilled at hopping from site to site. They don't need much of a reason to bail out on you, and they'll do just that if your blog is hard to navigate.