The Reader Blog Criqitue Checklist

The Reader Blog Criqitue was started around 2 and a half months ago. It has proved to be very popular and has generated some great ideas and suggestions for blog owners. One of the frequent commenters is Andrey Savchenko, more commonly known as Rarst. Rarst has participated in the critiques every week and his comments have been chosen as the best comment by several blog owners so I was intrigued when he offered to write a checklist for blog owners.

The following was wrote by Andrey Savchenko aka Rarst (subscribe via RSS Feed). He is currently taking part in Blogging Idol 2 so is offering guest posts and ad exchanges for free. Please contact him directly if this interests you.

Hope you Enjoy the post

Taking Blog Apart – Critique Checklist

According to numerous studies forming an opinion about a website takes seconds ie. opinion is as shallow as it is fast. If you are related to web publishing in any way then it’s very important to complement first impression with a methodical study.

Why bother

A lot of publishers, especially in the blogosphere, have plenty of internet browsing experience. A lot of that influences their habits and preferences online. It may be hard for a blogger to distance themselves from their creation and evaluate its strong and weak points so it is handy to have an evaluation routine.

Right before start

All blog critiques can be separated in two types:

1. You have previously visited the blog (this means you already have an opinion formed). In this case it’s important to take a second look at everything and note things that have changed since you first viewed the site.
2. You are seeing the blog for first time. This means you can properly notice and evaluate your first impression. It also means you have to look harder for subtle elements that take time to figure out.

Unseen Elements

There are some elements often missed in blog critiques simply because it’s difficult or impossible to see them.

It might be blog internal workings:

• Validate (X)HTML source code.
• Validate CSS source code.
• Check set and size of page elements, their load time.
• Check if XML sitemap for search engines present.
• Check if RSS feed auto-discovery works.

Or something you do not see or notice often:

• Check 404 error page (shown on invalid URLs).
• Check page with search results (if blog has the internal search).
• Check for favicon and its relevance to blog branding.
• Take a look in different browsers.

Header area

Top of blog sets the tone. It determines:

• General color scheme;
• Page proportions and what screen space is left for content;
• Brand (logo mostly, but not limited to);
• Navigation elements – links to static pages and other areas of interest.

Headers may serve different purposes. They can be aimed at anything ie sending visitors through to content as fast as possible. It’s important to determine if header design and content matches its purpose.

Static pages

Information that is not tied to blogging timeline is usually put on static pages. Common experience is that they are linked from navigation menu in header and few same ones are on every blog:

• Link to home page. Also commonly linked by logo but that is not a reason to skip it in navigation.
• About and contact pages (separate or combined). Brief or not they should serve purpose and common mistake is mixing them having contact info on about page and off-topic text on contact one.
• Archives page that organizes past posts in a way of blogger’s choice. Chronological and topical schemes are most common.

There are two important things to check with static pages:

• They work and not just sit there;
• Around five pages linked is usual, more may be too much.

Index area

Post presentation can be done in different ways:

• Classic with latest post on top and previous lower. It can be full posts shown or just excerpts.
• Magazine with highlighted featured post and grid of others

While classic looks are common it becomes easier to encounter magazine theme. Important thing here is that magazine themes are highly specialized. They serve best for blogs that need to highlight high amount of daily posts or variety of topics. Usage of magazine theme without purpose is a mistake to note.

If full posts are shown then it is important to check that vertical size and load time of page remains reasonable.

There is also different ways to handle post excerpts. They can be custom written, show beginning of post up to manual break point or be automatically generated. Usually anything is good as long as it’s not auto-generated.

Single page content area

Post pages are mostly associated with actual content but that is not the only important area here. Actually there are three:

• Post itself;
• Area after post with subscription options and related links;
• Comments area;

Title and post are usually fine as long as they look nice and remain readable. But area after post is critically important and often overlooked. It is one of the best possible places for RSS link and exactly where reader starts looking for more when done with reading post. Some themes also show block of totally useless info here (trackback links and such).

Comments are fine as long as they are readable but blogs with high number of comments require more work here. Plenty of visitors look for blog author’s comments so it’s good practice when they are highlighted.

Sidebar area

There are few rules here so sidebars are case by case. Widget overload is generally bad, rest can be very different. Some blogs have dynamic sidebar with contents different for different places (home page/post page/static page) so it’s worth to check for that.

Footer area

Footer is another one overlooked area. It can be:

• Plain with some info and navigation;
• Widgetized with 2-4 areas similar to sidebar in usage.

Same as sidebar – not much rules here. But there are often plenty of useless links here like "Log in" that should not be displayed and most common mistake ever – "©Copyright" which equals saying copyright twice. One must die.

Uncommon elements

Some blogs really like to stand out. They integrate dynamic services, make some elements appear only in specific conditions, use tools of bad fame (like pop-ups). In the end such uncommon elements are either:

• Good;
• Bad;
• Useless.

It’s important to determine correctly which case it is.

Summing up

Full round of critique is lots of time and lots of work. But in the end it all boils down to single summary:

• How good design looks are;
• Does it fulfill intended purpose;
• What parts that need fixing first.

I guess I’ve exhausted my list. Have something to add? More places you are looking into while performing blog critique? Tell me.

* This post was wrote by Andrey Savchenko of Rarst.

Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes Club
Posted on November 7th, 2008 and filed under Reader Blog Critique
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