Have you ever been to a site and thought, “I wish that I could send this to my friends quickly, where’s the tweet button?” or “Oh, that link didn’t work. I should tell the owner.” Can your readers easily do these things with the tools you have in place on your blog? Can they promote your post with the click of a button or shoot you an email about something on your site?
I can’t tell you how many times I have been to a site and wished that they had some very basic items to make it more user-friendly. Here are 3 things all sites need to have.
Contact Us Page
I don’t know where the trend started to drop the Contact Us (or Me) page from sites. Is it because blogs are more interactive or does the owner think this is an outdated convention? I don’t know about you, but if I find something wrong with the site such as a broken link or there is a problem with the layout, I don’t want to tell the world about it, just the owner. There is nothing more frustrating to be on a blog where I cannot send a private message or I have to go searching for a contact email. Readers have a limited attention span and more importantly limited time. Don’t make it hard for them to find you. That’s just frustrating and bad customer service. Put that contact page up there. After all, you want them to buy from you or use your services right?
Author Bio section
This isn’t found on a lot of sites, but it is gaining popularity. While an About Page usually goes into great detail about you and your company, adding a short sweet excerpt about you and your expertise at the end of each post is a nice reminder to a new reader or one that doesn’t want to read your About Us page. This is also very useful for Guest Bloggers too. Give them there own subscriber account where they can enter information about themselves. Then when they post, their author information is found at the bottom of the post. This gives you credibility and supports the author’s effort without a lot of work on your part.
TweetMeme Button
Now there are a lot of social icon buttons and sets out there that help promote a post. However, the TweetMeme button is bar far the most popular and easy to use. This is a great plugin that makes it easy for any reader to tweet your post without leaving your site. Not only can they promote the post, but it gives them an opportunity to add a comment in the tweet before being sent out to all their followers. This allows your readers to read, comment, and promote in the most efficient manner possible. If your reader has to switch over to HootSuite or Seesmic or some other Twitter application then odds are they won’t.
While nothing major will fail without these items and features, it may make your blog less user friendly and you may lose a few repeat readers because of it. The goal of your blog is to bring them in, show them around, and develop a new friendship. Blog owners that take the extra step to help their readers be more efficient in their already jam packed day will have more repeat visitors.
Photo by: S Migol
This post is part of our Guest Blogging contest, if you like it then why not sharing it with your friends by retweeting it? this will give credits to the author and a better chance to win one of our awesome prizes. By the way.. you also can participate in our contest, it’s not late!