April 12, 2006
6:52 pm
Everybody who has been running blog for a while and has done tones of modifications to the template (e.g. third-party ad code is often dodgy) or even if ’ve just redesigned, it’s worthwhile to do a bit of a clean often. Take a look at the below list, it is also a reminder for evey blog owner, who hasn’t completed all these things yet.
- Validate your home page template, your blog post templates and your CSS files -
http://validator.w3.org/
Type in your blog’s URL and click check. Reduce those errors down to 0. - Once validated, check your blog in multiple browsers, especially:
IE 6, Firefox and Safari. IE 5 is good too. If you’re on a PC, you can still see what your blog will look like in Safari thanks to SafariTest
Iron out any bugs. - Increase the font size in your browser settings for both IE and Firefox. Does your blog still work OK when you increase it up a couple of notches? Do you allow people to resize in IE? Does your blog work OK when you decrease the font size (not as important as the increasing though).
- Turn off stylesheets in your browser. Does the blog’s structure still make sense?
- Turn off images in your browser. Is everything still understandable? Is the text still readable?
- Try resizing your screen to 800 x 600 pixels and 1024 x 768 pixels. How does it look?
- Check the download time using this handy tool
- Check the quality report for your blog
- Read Blog design and usability advice and Blog Interface Design 2.0 for ideas as to how you can improve your blog’s interface
- Oh, and most importantly, talk to the people reading your blog - find out what they like and don’t like!
Web Developer’s Toolbar is an invaluable for many of these tasks.
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