Two Pet Peeves on Blogs

Today, I visited three blogs. Afterwards, I found that two of them left me a tad disappointed. It wasn’t the material. It wasn’t the writing. So, today, I’ll address the two things that will help make visiting your blog a better experience.

First, a reader wants the blog to load quickly.  In fact, if it takes too long to load, she’s going somewhere else. What is too long? Depends on the person, the day, and what’s competing for attention.  Some people are just naturally in a hurry.  And they do not want to wait.  Like the driver who’s easing into the crosswalk before the light turns green.   Yes, he may be on the way to the hospital where his first child is about to be born.  Yeah.  But that’ just one out of a thousand who can’t wait for the light to change.  Sitting still is wasting time.

Then it might be this is a day with thirty-six hours worth of stuff to get done. OR the boss is standing with his hand out, waiting for something he considers important (but you know really isn’t) and you need to get some info off this website.  Load slowly and you’ve made an enemy.

And of course, I really need to get on to a much better site (translate, more fun) and this turtle site is keeping you from getting to the good stuff.

So, how can we make the site load faster? The simplest way is to make sure pictures are not too large. By that I don’t mean putting in postage size images. I mean the images don’t have a boatload of bytes.  If you are going to blow up a digital photo into a wall sized picture, you need lots and lots of bytes.  A twenty megabyte picture might do the job. But you’re going to be posting a picture that could be three inches tall and four inches wide. Twenty megabytes or even one megabyte is a waste.

Load time is dependent on several issues. But a simplistic approach would say that a megabyte file will take roughly twice as long to load as a half-megabyte image.  If you are printing this on a high-resolution printer and you need/want great detail, then by all means take the megabyte image.

But, for a computer screen, you won’t see any difference in the displayed image between the megabyte file and the half-megabyte file.  And if it isn’t a particularly large image on the screen, you could get the same display quality from a fifty kilobyte file.  Often, twenty-five kilobytes is more than enough. And the load time for the megabyte file is noticeably longer than the twenty-five KB file. Also, when you load a large file for a small picture, the website is going to resize it – another waste of time.

Can you tell which of these images was nearly a megabyte file and which was a two hundred kilobytes file?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you have a lot of images already on your site which you didn’t optimize, do you have to go back and fix all of them?  Fortunately, you do not. There are some plugins that will reduce the size of picture files for you.

If you encourage comments you have another way to make the site friendlier. Get rid of the captchas.  Now, you will ask about spammers. There are plugins to help eliminate or reduce spammers. Find one that has good reviews and install it. See if that solves the issue or reduces it sufficiently that it’s not a problem anymore. Now, the commenter can just – comment.  That will make her happy.

I visit some sites on which I really want to leave a comment. But a captcha or some other obstruction makes it difficult, and time-consuming.  After a few minutes, I give up.  No comment.  The post elicited a comment, but I couldn’t find an easy way to leave one.

Those are just two things that will make your blog more attractive to readers. Of course, the two main ingredients of a great blog are: interesting, helpful material and well written material. If you write material that reads like a mathematic book, faster loads and easy commenting won’t help. First, you need to have a blog that is well written and gives the reader useful or interesting information. Once you’ve got this really good blog, don’t make it a chore to get the blog to load.  And make it easier for the reader to leave a comment.

No captcha here.  Leave a comment.  Thanks.