Blog Design Is Key To Return Readership
Blogging has boomed in recent years.
From individuals setting up blogs detailing their personal experiences and interests, to small and medium enterprises and large corporations setting up blogs to better connect with their customers on a personal level and to put a human face behind their corporate name, blogging is definitely on an upward trend.
This upward trend is evident from the number of blogs tracked by Technorati - it currently tracks about 60 million blogs.
Despite the large numbers of blogs in the blogosphere, there is one major issue, that is, the return readership of these blogs is extremely low.
Do you know that only 7% of the online US population reads blogs more than once a week? If you don’t, now you do.
Why is this so? Why do blogs garner such low return readership?
According to a recent study conducted by Forrester Research, the problem lies in bad blog design such as poor navigation and confusing terminology. Most blogs are fraught with usability problems.
In its study, Forrester Research evaluated the customer experience of 16 blogs. These blogs are written by executives of large US companies, corporate product and branding teams, newspaper journalists and today’s most popular professional bloggers.
Here’s the finding of the Study:
None of these blogs passed the usability tests, including the best blogs.
The conclusion is that to encourage more return blog readership, web design best practices should be applied to make blog content and functionality easy to find and consume, and emerging blog guidelines followed to make readers comfortable in wanting to engage in online conversations.
Popularity: 83%
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Technorati, blogosphere, return readership, Forrester Research, blog design, blogs, usability, blog readership, web design, best practices, blog guidelines
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January 11th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
It is easy to generalize, but hard to prove. Most of blog readers reach blogs through RSS readers…
Sure, not every bloggers have the skills to attract readers like crazy.
a simple plain design is enough, but easy to read (reader interest topic) posts are more important.