Jakob Nielsen does the list thing again, and this time targets weblogs. In his latest alert, published today, the - considered by many - main evangelist for website usability talks about the top 10 issues with most weblogs. Read the whole article by clicking here. My comments on some of the issues he points out are below:

No Author Biographies and photo

True, an author biography is necessary when the author wants to be known. I don’t like weblogs who have links to “about me” pages that have nothing more than a full name. Even worse than this, though is something I’ve covered in my own post about website usability - and that is the lack of contact information. Believe it or not, I had to almost pummel Gabe from Memeorandum into putting having his email on the website.

On the photos though, its time to disagree with Nielsen. I personally don’t see a necessity for a photo with the biography information in a weblog. While I have no problems with having my photo in the about page, I can see a lot of people not willing to have it in their website for privacy reasons. Sure, it increases credibility when you add a face to the words, but reasoning that “it connects the virtual and physical worlds” isn’t really about usability but social psychology.

Nondescript Posting Titles

Very true. With the abundance of information on the web, sometimes the only thing that distinguishes something I’ll read from something I won’t is the title - mainly because going through the 1200 average blog posts per day my current subscription list gives me is overhaul. The best thing to do to get inspiration for better post titles is to look at regular publications and see the patterns in length and keyword selection.

The Calendar is the Only Navigation

I’ve posted about this on an old article. People who visit weblogs aren’t usually interested in browsing archives by month or week, but by topic. Hence, it is a good rule of thumb to have proper categorization measures, so that your category navigation returns meaningful results. Search (that Jakob doesn’t mention) is also an extremely important asset if your weblog has articles of an atemporal nature.

Bottom line: Allow people to find your content, but don’t assume they keep up with the dates you’ve posted on. Category navigation is more important than date archives, that most people insist on keeping on sidebars.

Conclusion and further reading

Jakob’s latest alertbox proves its value, but I would say most of the other tips are based on common sense - chances are, if you’re reading articles on the blogosphere or are a part of it, you have already considered most of these issues, consciously or not.

For those who want more tips on website usability, my series on pleasing Jakob Nielsen by tackling the 10 biggest design mistakes may be a good read: part 1, part 2 and part 3.