Welcome, BlogHers!

The speaker for this sub-session is Nelly Yusupova from Webgrrls International, and the focus of the lecture is on building design and usability into your blog plan. In this lecture, blog and website are used interchangeably.

Webgrrls is a networking group for women in technology. Today’s session is about creation of a plan for your website with the goals of increasing traffic and keeping faithful users.

Online, an impression is made about a website in the blink of an eye - literally. Visual appeal is very important; if it is not appealing at first blush, the user will navigate away from the page and you will not be able to influence them. It takes “too long” to recover from a bad first impression.

Follow up:

In order to create a plan, it is necessary to understand the goals of the website. Nelly uses a pre-plan questionnaire that helps a blogger identify their needs.

Some questions to consider when creating a plan are:

1. What are your objectives for the design or re-design?
Examples: “I want to build and sustain readership.”
“I want to make money in advertising.”

An example brought up by an audience member included “movement from reader to customer.” Another example was to “break out of the standard template.”

2. Who is your target audience?
Example: Mothers with teenagers
Marketing specialists

An audience submission was “rich women in Los Altos and Los Gatos.”

3. What is the first impression you want your design to convey?
Examples: “Professional”
“Sarcastic and witty”

Audience: “Serious and provocative” “Casual but welcoming”

4. What would be the best way to convey that message?
Examples: Imagery, photos, colors and borders

Audience: “Jewish leadership: Torah scroll, Hebrew font” & “Software focus: Excerpts from documentation”

5. What is your budget?

6. Find 3 websites you like.
Look at your competition, observe their style

7. How will you measure success?
- Very important!
Examples: Number of visits
Number of book sales
Number of subscribers to RSS feeds

Audience: Number of return visitors

The goal is to create loyal readers: “Loyal readers are valuable readers.” In a study by Surveysite.com, 74% of readers return because of content. 71% return for enjoyability of the site. Other major issues include uniqueness, ease of access, attractiveness, and ease of navigation/speed.

The Poynter Institute’s Eye Tracking Study found that the top left of the page and upper portion of the page, before moving down and to the right. Ads perform better in the left hand column on a page. Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performs the best. The lower portion of a page is a good place to grab attention. Ads work better when placed next to popular editorial content.

The Design Plan:

1. Branding Elements
Logo, Tagline, Topic Definition, Colors

Colors speak to people’s emotions. It’s hard to pick out colors because the feelings are subjective.

The human eye can’t focus on red and blue at the same time. Members of the same color family (warm or cool) go together better.

2. Feature Sets
RSS feeds, search, titles, pages, blogroll, archives, comments

Make a list of all the feature sets you think you should have. Then ask yourself: What is the purpose of this feature? How does it influence my website strategy? How does it help me achieve my website goals? Just because it exists doesn’t mean you need it!

Audience member: Too many widgets can be a turn off if people don’t understand it or its purpose.

3. Placement
Where is the most effective place to put your item?
People process a webpage in the shape of an “F". Picture how you draw an “F” and eye tracking is similar. RSS feeds should go near the top so they don’t go searching to subscribe.

Design and Usability Tips:

1. Identify your blog’s focus.
Example: lifehacker.com
Targeting and staying focused is very important and this helps retain readers. Consider a separate RSS feed for each category if you have multiple categories that are very different for each other.

2. Create Quality Content and Post Regularly
Remember: 74% of users return for content!
Audience member: How often you post can depend on your audience.

3. Make your blog content readable.
Remember: 68% of users return because content is well organized and readable. Do NOT use custom fonts; your website will not look right on other browsers. Different text size and weight to create contrast. Times, Arial, and Verdana are good ones. How does it read against your colored background? Black and gray - NO. Blue on Black - NO. Purple on Red - NO. If your website is printed a lot, double check how it looks printed out. Textured background is hard to read.

Chunking: Good for scanning. Break long paragraphs into chunks with descriptive headers. Integrate links into text.

Use clear titles.

4. Build trust with your readers. Bios and testimonials are good.

We ran out of time for this segment. Quick wrap up: make it easy to subscribe to your blog, include related posts, make it easy to find content, do not archive by date, and recent posts sections are good. Use comments to build readers, get your own domain, and reward commenters. No more than 20 categories.

Downloads are available here.

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The speaker for the sub-session on how to increase website speed is Tenni Theurer from the Exceptional Performance Team at Yahoo!.

Front End Performance: You don’t need to be an engineer! There are tools that can be used to analyze what’s going on in a page, and these tools reveal where downloading takes the most time.

Empty cache user vs. Primed cache user: People coming back to site multiple sites in one day or one week or one month. As bandwith speeds are increasing, downloading is taking longer because people are adding more content! Yahoo! studies found that lots of people were coming in with an empty cache because of refresh, securityware, and other reasons. Return users are coming in with an empty cache. This forces the development team to focus on the content in the page – everything needs to have value.

Performance Golden Rule: Yahoo! attempts to evangelize best practices. 80-90% of the end user’s response time is spent on the front end. If you want to optimize, start at the front end. This is especially important if your readers are from overseas (not in US) and is dependent on how your readership logs in (wireless, DSL, dial-up).

14 Rules of engineering:

1. Make fewer HTTP requests
2. Use a CDN
3. Add an Expires header
4. Gzip components
5. Put stylesheets at the top
6. Move scripts to the bottom
7. Avoid CSS expressions
8. Make JS and CSS external
9. Reduce DNS lookups
10. Minify JS
11. Avoid redirects
12. Remove duplicate scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. Make AJAC cacheable