OK, I admit it: I'm superstitious. I believe small changes can have big impact. Like the placing of an ad on your blog. The colors of your blog template. Putting the navigation to the left, or right. Underlining links. Line length and font choice. Releasing something under a Creative Commons license. Having comments enabled. Asking people for feedback. Publishing your email on the front-page.
But wait -- why would these details matter? After all, people will still find your links, even if they're not underlined. People will still contact you, even if they have to dig a little deeper to get to your email. Isn't that like talking about the cause and effect of a black cat on your porch or the number 13?
When you design your blog for a lot of people, you will inevitably notice that almost any design choice will have some impact. I'm not talking about just the layout choices made, but the overall information design and usability. As soon as you have many visitors, everything you do will change someones way of interacting with your blog.
Let's say you release your content under a Creative Commons license. While only a small change to your footnote, it might have a big overall impact. You might suddenly be found in search engines specializing on Creative Commons content, or your content may suddenly appear in other places you didn't know of. Maybe that other place in return exposes your content to someone who wouldn't have seen it otherwise, and maybe that someone is the authority blogger who's the tipping point for your blog success. You heard the one about the butterfly and the tornado.
People interact with your site, and you make up the rules for that interaction. But make up the wrong rules and people stop participating. Because there's something stronger than the artificial rules you make up, and those are the almost natural rules of blogspace and beyond. Like gravity. Or evolution. Or day and night. You can't escape it, or if you do, it causes you to spend a lot of energy!
It's a world of cause and effect, and even though the web and your blog are part of a virtual world, there are common phenomenon which you can't just bend. When designing your blog, you may think, "I don't want to look like everyone else." And you're right about that. But also, don't be too different when it comes to certain crucial issues. Do name your about page "About". Do name your home link "Home". Be too smart, too creative, and you might lose some people.
One time, a reader emailed me asking about something he couldn't find in my blog. I told him "it's in the navigation" (and my navigation isn't crowded). But you know what? He told me he didn't even realize those links were there -- because they weren't underlined. And even though I thought I'd made it clear through my use of colors, it wasn't clear enough and some people missed it. I learned that lesson and underlined the links. The most simple, silly and easy Nielsen-like approach. And yet I believe it pays in the long term, even though 95% of my readers wouldn't need it. But I'm superstitious! Small things can have big effects.
You noticed the photos of authors on every post on Performancing.com. A small design choice, for sure. A little over 5,000 pixels, all in all, and you have hundreds of thousands of pixels on your screen. Or take Micro Persuasion, or any other blog with the author's photo prominently featured. Well it doesn't matter, does it? Rubies don't bring health and wearing an opal isn't bad luck. But you guessed it -- I believe it completely changes the rules of the game. Using our mugshots morphs Performancing from anonymous multi-author blog to a group of people talking to you; it almost becomes something natural, something real. We don't make up all the rules -- human brains are created to understand faces. We can understand the rules, and thus spend less energy by using them. Have you thought about using a small photo on your blog's front-page? Be a little superstitious and believe it might have big impact!
In almost all of your design choices, you think about how to make the reader spend less energy in understanding and interacting with your site. That's usability. There's one major exception which I should mention here: ad placement. Many bloggers optimize their blog so you will have the largest possible problem in separating the ads from the content and ultimately ignoring them. And I'm not judging that -- bloggers have a right to try to make money. Of course, your readers have the right to just leave, so this approach can be overdone, too. In my own blog, I try to strike a balance between making my ads invisible and making them annoying. I believe placing the ad right inside my posts would get me higher click-through rates; and I equally believe that this small change might make my posts harder to read. In the long-term, this might have damaging effects to my kind of blog. I won't risk that -- I'm superstitious.
In a paper on superstition, there were several available definitions of the term. I like this one the best, because it perfectly fits the human-created web we interact on: "Superstition - To believe that mind created and controls matter." In real life, that might be magic; in a virtual world, it's only natural. Be superstitious, and take control of our blog.
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