Teach42 gave this challenge for Day 6:“Your challenge for today is to share your blog with someone who has never seen it before. Choose a friend, colleague, family member or total stranger and ask them to sit down at your blog and explore it. If possible do it in person so you can see them actually doing it. Don’t give them any prep per se, just ask them to check it out and explore. Then see what they do. You can learn an incredible amount of information from just watching their explorations. Even if you can’t watch them do it yourself, ask them questions afterwards to see what their experience was like.
• Where do they click?
• What do they find?
• What do they miss?
• Are there parts of it that are unintuitive?
• Are there features that you’ve built in that aren’t quite as ‘obvious’ as you thought they were?
• Is it easy to navigate around or do they have trouble making their way from one section to another?
• Is there any information that they wish you had provided that isn’t there?
• Are there any parts that they didn’t understand the purpose of?
• Any general suggestions that they have for improvement?
• What parts of your blog were most memorable to them, 10-20 minutes after they explored it?”
Since I am not around many new people, I was unable to do this day’s challenge but I feel the results would be really important to know. If you have never read my blog before today, maybe you can help me answer these questions for me. I will keep this here and when I find someone new, I might get them to look at my blog so I can answer these. I love the questions and would really learn a lot from the constructive criticism.
photo credit: Original image: 'Rosie the Blogger' http://www.flickr.com/photos/9106303@N05/2493066577by: Mike Licht
4 comments:
I think the content on your blog is excellent; I really enjoyed reading the posts as I explored your site. Your content information, subscription feeds, and other important information is visible and accessible. I think your blog template might need a little tweaking as some of your sidebar widgets are not properly displayed. I am having a similar issue with my blogger blog and am reviewing CSS coding information to, hopefully, resolve the issue. http://www.tizag.com/cssT/ Keep up the great blogging!
jennifer: Thanks for telling me about the sidebar widgets. I have been trying to fix the width of them but I haven't had much success. Thanks for your kind words too!
Hi Pat,
I am thinking back to when I first came upon your blog. It was back in the day when I hadn't yet discovered how to add my own images to my blog header. I was blown away by how professional your site looked!
You picked a great name for your blog - one that is easy to remember and makes people feel successful just by reading it!
I love how you show the subscription information early - this makes it easy to find. Maybe I will make this change in my own blog.
Your visitor count blows me away and makes me very jealous! This is another indicator for 'first timers' that your site is worth looking at.
When I first started looking at your blog, I didn't know what twitter etc were about, but found this section on your site useful for linking up with you when I finally DID learn some more. (I'm yet to check out your flickr things).
A couple of other things I love about your blog (and should consider as options for my own blog at some point) are regular items like the Teacher Toolbox and the Blog Carnival. I also love how you are doing this whole "Days to being a better blogger". I'm only depressed that I missed joining in from the start!
Thank you for being such an inspiring blogger and leading the way for the rest of us.
Penny: Thank you so much for your kind words! I feel honored that you wrote all those things and couldn't wait to share them with my hubby, who wonders why I blog and if anyone even reads what I write! You validated what I am trying to do and made me feel wonderful!
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