By: Mandeep

The following is a list of things that can help you in increasing your blog’s usability.

Navigation:

There are variety of templates to give skin to your blog. But choosing the best template is a critical job. Templates with scroll down to the bottom of the blog to navigate are not the best choice. Stick to standard left column or right column navigation.

Search Box:

You should include a search box in the main body of your blog or the sidebar. Other than the convenience for users, the added advantage is that unlike Google search box, the search results will appear in the main body of your Blog. Continual visitors may not remember a post that’s not instinctive to find through your navigation menu or tag system. They might also want to find their own comments, so make that possible by placing a search box somewhere in your layout.

Background & Text:

Anything that makes your blog harder to read should be avoided. Avoid low contrast combinations like black with red and busy patterned backgrounds. White text on a black background, causes eyestrain.

Linking to Posts:

You can use permalinks.These remains unchanged so points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives.Linking back to previous entries builds page strength for those posts and can help you with search engine rankings. But don’t be afraid to link off your site, this can help you get noticed by other bloggers.You can combine links with template tags like header, footer, or sidebar. You can make Absolute links (defines absolutely where to find the target of the link) OR Relative links (define the location of another document in relation to the current document) in your blog posts.

Excessive Advertising:

When ads appear all over the page and even in the middle of posts, the user suffers. Avoid contextual ads programs that highlight words in your posts to make them look like hyperlinks, but popup an ad when they are rolled over with a mouse.

Mannage Your Comments:

Don’t allow everyone to post whatever they want in your comments section. Not only is this annoying to your readers, but also takes down the professionalism of your blog. So moderate your comments yourself.

Regular Posting:

Don’t put time lags between posts.Pick a posting schedule and stick to it. If you don’t have anything to post you can give link of anothers blog post in your blog post. It wil not harm your blog because atleast you are providing a useful info to your reader.

Be Subject Specific:

Don’t make posts on different subjects other then your theme or subject of your blog. Categories should relevent to your blog theme.Random blog entries are not a good approach for a serious, professional blog.

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The WordPress User Level system is designed to give the blog owner the ability to control and assign what users can and cannot do in the blog. You’re in good company if you use WordPress to publish yourself on the web.Using WordPress is beneficial to use because:

• Ease of installation,No ads
• It gives the ability to completely customize Wordpress code
• You can distribute podcasts with audio player plugins
• You can categorize your posts by topic, not just by date
• You can choose from hundreds of themes/skins
• You Can integrate plugins of your own choice
• Large user community with help forums
• Extensive documentation

There are many different urls for the same blog post which are different in their text format but redirect the user to the same page.

For Example:

http://www.yourblog.com/blog-post
http://yourblog.com/blog-post/
http://www.yourblog.com/blog-post/
http://yourblog.com/blog-post

Technically these urls are different but most of the users consider these the same urls. It creates the problem to Google to pick the best url when there are several choices. Google sees these as 4 different pages but actually it is only one. Only one of them will rank higher in Google than the rest. So choose only the one url that seems like the best representative for your site and use that url consistently across your entire site.

Suppose you get link on www.yourblog.com/blog-post but in actual www.yourblog.com/blog-post/ has higher page rank then link for www.yourblog.com/blog-post is useless from ranking point of view.

In WordPress to get all 4 versions made into only one and to have all power transferred to that one firstly you have to enable the Permalinks,and then add the following lines in the .htaccess file before the WordPress permalinks lines:

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourblog\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourblog.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourblog.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

That will make all posts go to this version: www.yourblog.com/blog-post/

Here is Little about .htaccess file

Web hosting users can do with .htaccess:

• Specify custom error documents
• Add special document handlers and MIME types
• Set environment variables
• Redirect URLs from one to another
• Rewrite one URL into another
• Restrict documents to specific people

Format of .htaccess file:

• The dot in .htaccess makes it a ‘hidden’ Unix file. It is not listed in a normal directory listing. If default directory indexes are enabled on the web server, this file will be hidden in those lists also.
• It is a plain ASCII text file. It should be editted with an ASCII text editor like notepad.
• Comments are marked with a hash (#) at the start of the line.

# this is a commented-out line

• It needs to be readable by the server (’world’ readable), which can be a security problem.

So don’t forget to enable Permalinks.

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