Jacob Nielson Rapidly Losing Credibility

Adrian Sutton

There was a time when the word of Jacob Nielson was undoubtable right and everyone must bow down before it. Fortunately it appears that time is well and truly over. His latest article on blog usability completely misses the point of blogs, the target audience of most blogs and often passes a simple reality check.

  1. No Author Biographies
    • Let’s face it, no one really cares about you. Unless your an A or B list blogger the vast majority of your traffic comes from search engines. Most of the time your readers are just looking for the solution to their problem. They don’t need to know whether or not your reliable or intelligent, they just check to see if your proposed solution works.
  2. No Author Photo

    • You’re a geek – no one wants to see your photo. Also, see item 1.

    • If the point of your blog is to make people recognize you in the street then you should:

      1. Try acting, singing or Funniest Home Videos – you're more likely to succeed.
      2. Post your photo on your blog.

    • Otherwise include it only if it benefits your design and doesn’t distract people. They want your content, not your photo.

  3. Nondescript Posting Titles
    • This ones a good point if you want search engines to pick you up.
    • If you’re not targeting search engines though, use titles that are most likely to lure in your readers. Go browse the front cover of your average magazine for good examples, or say something controversial or insulting – you know, like “Jacob Nielson Rapidly Losing Credibility”.
  4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go
    • Good advice.
    • It should however be noted that in context the link does quite clearly say where it’s going. It’s only bad if your target audience is skipping from link to link.
  5. Classic Hits Are Buried
    • Nope, classic hits are the top item in search engines. People don’t visit your blog looking for classic content they’ve already read. They find your blog by being linked directly to a story they find interesting or by finding it in a search engine.
    • Most blog content rapidly goes out of date. It’s a time based medium and is navigated differently to the rest of the web even though it uses the same technologies (ie: hyperlinks).
  6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
    • Most blogs have categories, most people don’t use them.
    • Again, people don’t care about previous postings very much, they want to read the article that was directly linked to.
  7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
    • RSS and Aggregation. Most of your readers are notified when you post a new entry or it turns up on a Planet aggregator or similar site.
    • Other users get their by search engines or because they followed a link from another site. In either case they don’t care when you publish, just that the article they want is still there.
  8. Mixing Topics
    • It’s my blog and I’ll do what I want.
    • From the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen, you can post on quite a range of topics and not annoy people. It’s just so easy to skip over an entry and besides which, most of your readers are coming from search engines and links. Are we noticing a theme here yet?
  9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
    • Good point. You should always remember that what you write in public is, you know, in public. Behave yourself.
    • Of course if you don’t provide an easy Rants category your future boss will probably not bother to read all of your entries and everyone knows that people occasionally have a bad day.
  10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
    • Good point.
    • Not as bad a mistake as Jacob makes it sound though. Remember how most of your readers find you via a search engine? Yeah, the search engines work out that you’ve moved eventually.
    • Also, redirects are your friend, but aren’t always simple or even possible to set up with hosted services. Any links to my old URL on intencha.com still get you to my blog at its new URL today.

The rules for what is good and bad on blogs differs for each and every blog. It all depends on the target audience. It’s also important to remember that making your blog popular is about being ranked highly on search engines and getting other bloggers to link to you. Building a successful business blog is about building a successful relationship with your clients, not reaching the most people. Maybe for you, blogging is just about having a place to dump your thoughts and seeing what other people have to say about them. Maybe it’s just a place to rave and rant about anything you want. Whatever the purpose of your blog, measure it’s success by how well it meets those goals, not by what some idiot pimping his training sessions tells you.

Oh and yes, this entry is the start of my push to make “over-use of lists” the number one blog design mistake for next year, it’s kind of my “I have a WYSIWYG editor with awesome list support and I’m not afraid to use it” statement. I’ve probably also thrown in a few extra apostrophe’s just for Greg (note link not telling you where it goes – oh I’m so naughty).