Last week I was asked to review and provide feedback on a website
design for a friend's company. Like many of today's business websites,
the site had a blog. The blog was created using
Serendipity. On the left hand column of this blog, under the header "Syndicate This Blog" you will see the following links:
- RSS 0.91 feed
- RSS 1.0 feed
- RSS 2.0 feed
- ATOM 0.3 feed
- ATOM 1.0 feed
- RSS 2.0 Comments
Here is screenshot for greater confusion:
The rest of the site looked good, but the clutter and indirection of
the above options made me decide to write the following email, in
response (name removed to protect the innocent):
Hi ****,
Nice site. You should consider running your blog’s RSS/Atom feeds
through http://FeedBurner.com. FeedBurner gives you an easy way to
track how many readers you have and what posts they are clicking on.
You can put one subscription link on your blog that takes your new
subscriber to a page that allows them to easily add your blog to their
favorite RSS/Atom reader (i.e. Bloglines, MSN, Yahoo, etc.). If you
have to change the URL of your blog, your FeedBurner link remains the
same and your subscribers have to change nothing on their end, to
continue to receive your blog postings. You get all of these features
for FREE.
Currently you have 6 different “syndication” links. However, your
average user doesn’t know what “syndication” links are used for.
Consider changing this to one “Subscribe to this blog” (or something
similar) button/link. This can easily be done with FeedBurner.
Hope this helps.
Tod
After sending the above email and reveling in my superior design knowledge, I visited my own blog. Oops...
On my blog, about halfway down the left hand column, under the header "Syndication", I had the following links:
How could this be? It appears that I have been too lazy to take my own
advice. If you have ever tried to edit a Community Server (pre-2007)
theme, you would understand why I would have been so reluctant. I
decided that my own hypocrisy was too much to bear. I sifted through my
site and found the the offending "Syndication" section. I changed
"Syndication" to "Subscribe", replaced the two links with one
"Subscribe to this blog" link, and moved the new "Subscription" section
to the top of the page, just below my own glamour shot (by Deb).
Voila! My ego remains intact. Since making the above changes to my own
site, I have had a noticeable increase in subscribers, to the highest
it has ever been (yes, a whopping 46). Coincidence? Maybe, but I doubt
it.
As for my friend, his response was, as follows:
Thanks Tod. This is on the list to change in the near future…… Too many things in such a short time!
I completely understand.