Visitor Friendliness

Have you ever gone to a website and had to leave because the page took forever to load, the colors were headache inducing, the font was too small or the contrast not enough to read the letters? Have you ever seen a page that doesn't load correctly, is inconvenient because of faulty or slow badly working javascript? (A surprising number of big name sites have this problem.) Have you ever seen a page that extends way off the right edge of the screen? I've seen some where you literally have to scroll side to side to read a single sentence.

So many people seem oblivious to the concept of how their website looks to their visitors, or how easy their website is for others to use. The entire point of having a website is for other people to visit it, so I think it's pretty important to consider how your site looks to those who visit.

Some visitor friendly issues are already dealt with for you when you choose to use a Blogger blog, but others are not.

• Different people have different computer systems, different monitor resolutions, different bandwidths. Unless your blog is only for the rich urban crowd, it would be a mistake to assume everyone has the newest system and fastest bandwidth and build only for those people.


• People use different browsers, and it's their choice, not yours. Why would you build your site only for one browser to display correctly? Even if your website is about a specific browser, you want the people not using it to be able to read your site and learn how great your browser is.


• As people age, eyesight tends to get worse, lots of people need to enlarge text to read it more easily. Is your website only for people with perfect eyesight, or would you like to make it easy for everyone to read?

There is no reason to limit who can enjoy your website if you just think about user friendliness as you make your choices. All my blog templates are made to help you keep your blog user friendly. Read about the features I incorporate. I also have several tutorials on my website about different blog template related subjects, so look around.

I've added a couple of polls to this blog. I'd love some feedback on the subject in the polls and comments of this post. Why don't people think about visitor friendliness? Or is it really unimportant to most bloggers?