WordPress Usability: Plugins That Make Your Blog More Visitor Friendly

Editorial Staff — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:54:03 +0000

In a recent post, We touted the benefits of hacking WordPress over the installation of plugins. One of these benefits is that plugins can cause your blog to become bloated. Among other issues, a bloated blog takes longer to load. With the blogosphere being saturated with content on virtually any topic you can think of, making your blog as visitor friendly as possible should be one of your primary design goals.

While I certainly promote the use of hacks over plugins, I know that part of the beauty of the plugin is so that a blogger can create a fully-functional site without having to get their hands dirty with the code that drives their blogging software. Instead of looking at hacking the code, let’s take a look at a few plugins that can help build a more usable blog for your visitors.

Usability

The best definition of usability I have seen comes from the Base One Agency who states that “usability refers to how simple it is for customers to perform the desired actions on a website. Good usability can improve the conversion rate of a web site.” So in addition to how long it takes to load a WordPress blog, to achieve usability, you would need to look first at what the desired goals of your blog are. Is it to drive sales? Then your content needs to establish trust among your readers. For a more detailed look into the psychology behind usability, have a look at our previous post that covered Webpage Usability.

The Plug-ins

In the following sections, we will take a look at five different plugins that will help increase the level of usability for your blog.

Akismet

Installing Akisment and including your API key from WordPress helps keep spammers at bay. A blog with no spam is a blog that people can trust without having to worry about the comments being loaded with links to garbage.

Subscribe to comments

Provide a checkbox for your users to select whether or not they want to be notified via email when someone has commented on your blog. Of course, they need to comment in order to use this but it does wonders to encourage the building of a community around your blog.

WP-Print

While it is great that reading on the web saves paper and toner, sometimes your visitors want, or need, to print out your words of wisdom. WP-Print lets them do this by creating a printer-friendly version of your blog page.

Post Teaser

One of the most difficult things to do is read a web page that falls below the fold. Post Teaser helps by providing your visitors with a preview of a post for the main, archive and category pages of your blog. A link below directs them to the full post page. Other features include a word count, image count, and an estimated reading time.

WP Super Cache

The way wp super cache works is much more complicated that this, but what it does is take the dynamically created WordPress page and generate a static html page from it. This static page is then served to the following visitors:

Visitors who are not logged in
Visitors who have not left a comment on your blog
Visitors who have not viewed a password protected post

Without the need to process all of the labor intensive PHP scripts that aren’t required by the static html file, your blog will load much faster for a majority of your site’s visitors.
Again, these are my recommendations. If you know of a plug-in that has greatly enhanced your blog’s usability, I encourage you to share your experience in the comments section. If you have experience with any of these plug-ins as well, we would like to hear your thoughts.

Understanding Webpage Usability

Editorial Staff — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:17:43 +0000

Often when designers are creating new web pages, they rely on the design of the elements within a page. Banners have to look pleasant; navigation buttons have to be consistent and so on. But when these elements are placed together within a page, they create dynamics that attract user attention. The study on user attraction, or attentiveness, is a part of what is called usability – a guide on how to assess purposefulness of a user interface.

That is why you might notice that the most popular websites like Google and Facebook have minimalistic designs and there is a good reason for such approach.

Less Is More

There is a common saying amongst designers and developers alike – Keep It Simple and stupid. A webpage that sells shampoos to customers should only have the necessary webpages to sell that particular product and not anything else. Users don’t need to know the size of the bottle or even what colour of the shampoo would be.

When things are kept simple, users get to do tasks quickly and when they do, they will appreciate and come back to your website again.

Gestalt Psychology

There is a popular research subject called Cognitive Psychology that a lot of designers are paying attention to. It involves studying how humans perceive things around them and assess how long can we pay attention to a particular detail.

Gestalt Laws are a set of rules that define how we group objects together; take a look at these example diagrams.

See how you tend to ‘group’ a particular pattern and arrangement of items within that diagram? Designers now take advantage of these Gestalt Laws by applying them in their websites during the design phase. It might seem obvious, but that is why navigation bars are always a straight line and grouped items get our first attention.

I’ll be coming up with another article explaining Cognitive Psychology in detail, so stay tuned.

Users Are Highly Critical, Even If We Don’t Realise It

Most designers often think of designing the best looking websites, because of course, that’s what they do. But good designers are able to look at a website design not from a designers point of view, but from the user’s point of view. This is because users are often critical about any webpages they visit.

A website would look incredibly unreliable once they detect spelling errors or links that are broken. Why should a website promote the designer at the bottom of every page when that is not what they are looking for? These errors are subtle, yet they provide the most impact subconsciously when users are browsing the Internet.

Avoiding Pitfalls

The bottom line for a good design is always simplicity and a lot of common sense. Being able to think like the user and not the designer would give you the biggest advantage in designing not only purposeful websites but pleasing looking ones.

Web Design Booth » Usability