I enjoy visiting a lot of different blogs in different niches. I try to get to a few other blogs everyday. I have been doing this for a few years now and I have noticed some things that drive me a little crazy when I see them on a blog…
1) Music that plays by itself. Remember the days of Myspace and playlists? That was fun but I don’t enjoy seeing it on a blog. When I am looking through blogs I am usually listening to music or a podcast and if music starts randomly playing on a blog, it is a huge turn off for me. In fact, it drives me nuts. Any music you have on your blog should not start automatically. I understand wanting to share music but it is so much nicer to let the reader chose if and when they want to hear it.
2) White writing on a black background. This is frustrating because it is hard to read. I might really enjoy what you are talking about but if it is hard to read I am more likely to stop following you. It also can give some people a headache and that isn’t good. It might work for sites that are more photos than words as photos look really nice on a black background.
3) Word verification or captcha. I hate this. I really really hate the Blogger.com version of it with the numbers against a wall. I usually can’t even figure out what the numbers or letters are. Now I know spam is a problem but there are other ways to deal with it. Word verification is a huge turn off to me. I also don’t like when I leave a comment and get up from my computer only to come back to it hours later to see I missed filling it out because of captcha. Just say no to captcha. I would rather check a box or something easy like that.
4) Not allowing comments. I know there are certain blogs where this is needed but if I am reading your blog and want to respond, let me leave a comment. I don’t want to click on another link and go somewhere else to do it. I want to leave it right there on your blog. I can understand turning off comments if things get too heated on a certain post or even after a certain amount of time but please let your readers have a say.
5) No way to share you on Social Media. I know that I can copy and paste your link to whatever social media site I want but it is a lot easier if you have a button right there for me to use. It makes it easy for me to share your post which is better for you. If nothing else, make sure you have share buttons for Google+, Facebook and Twitter as those are the most popular of the social media sites.
Not everyone blogs the same way and there is a lot of debate about how to handle things in the blogging world but I think most of us bloggers would agree on this list. When you have your own blog, you don’t want to be turning people off for silly reasons that you could easily change.
