Jakob Nielsen, the usability expert, now comments on the usability problems of blogs including but not limited to:

• No Author Biographies
• Nondescript Posting Titles
• Links Don’t Say Where They Go
• The Calendar is the Only Navigation
• Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

I wanted to point these few out because I agree with them…especially if we want to use blogs for ministry.

• We need biographies on there so people know who we are. People (mostly) respond to people.
• Nondescript titles aren’t always bad, but you do give up some good keyword matching opportunities for search engines. Don’t be cute at the expense of usability and potential search engine rankings.
• A pet peeve of mine is people using the word “here” or “link” to link somewhere. Use good anchor text (the underlined words of a hyperlink) mostly because it highlights key words for visiting people and search engine crawlers.
• Another bother of mine for blogs is using a calendar (be it text or graphical) for the main navigation. That’s one reason I switched from blogger to wordpress — so I could use categories. But unfortunately this is a tough one for blogs because it’s the standard default. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best.
• Another reason I switched is I was tired of giving blogspot marketing in my domain. Think about this: who’s marketing advantage is it to have a domain like .blogspot or .typepad in the URL? Yours? Or theirs?

Now if I could just follow them all myself!