I’ve made a number of improvements to find posts and get around the blog, I’m featuring five improvements that I think readers will like.
1. Random Post Plugin
I’ve been working on the blog upgrading usability somewhat in the last few days. I’ve also been trying out the Random Post Plugin.
You can see it clearly in the grey bar at the top of the blog! Try it!
2. ADDTHIS Widget
The AddThis Bookmark plugin is now featured. I’ve used three separate instances of the Bookmark This code in each page to help readers add this to their favorite service. It works well.
3. Bob’s Simplistic Navigation
I’m also using Top/Bottom Navigation which places code at the top and bottom of the blog page to show the previous/next post. It’s a standard feature in some themes, including Kubrick, but not my current theme. I still need to sort out the words since I use LONG titles.
In Pages View it’s fine, but the long title in Single Post View is ugly. See what I mean in the next picture…
There’s no clear marker between the two posts. Oh, well. You can get the plugin here. It’s still pretty neat.
4. Related Posts Plugin
This plugin simply “returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches.” You can see it on the main pages and on the Single Post pages. It requires a little hacking of the theme since it’s not installed by standard, but it works well. Get it here.
5. Feature Pages
I’m adding feature pages that are posts in the top bar, it’s slow progress, and I don’t want to crowd the bar area with too many, but this theme allows this extra space, and it’s easy to edit. Just edit the HTML in the theme header.
Right now, it’s just got ‘WordPress and Top Posts’ but I’ll expand it slowly to include more posts that I want to highlight!
So those five ways will help readers find pages, esp. important pages, their own favorites and discover new stuff… When there are nearly a thousand posts in the archives, it’s time to help readers find some of the better ones. And these three tools help a lot.
How do you help readers find their way around your blog? As a reader, what do you like or hate in blog navigation? I know I loathe really long and loaded sidebars…. but… what about you?