Contrast between text and background

Even though the background of your blog is not distractingly photo-realistic but all in nice single color, it doesn't mean the text is easy to read if the contrast between text and background is not sufficient enough. In this example the text is in black and background is darkish green, which made reading this blog felt like reading a book in candlelight, that there was not enough light in the room, i.e. tiresome. If you want to give your blog a personal touch and feel like black text in white background is too boring or somehow beneath your artistic merits, use light colors as background colors. If the user has to click and mark a portion of text with mouse to be able to read the text properly, you have a problem. In that case you may as well write On the Origin of Species 2.0 and have nobody bothering to read it beyond the first phrase. So remember the good contrast between text and background, and make reading easier for users!

Yet another distracting blog background

I was again randomly browsing the vast blogosphere to find some interesting blogs (there are many good usability blogs around and of course blogs about nearly anything and then some more), to compare writing styles and to find some bad usability to point fingers at. Lo and behold! Among the first couple of specimens was yet another example of nice but distracting blog background to add to previous examples. Sunset and trees look really nice and moody, but the scenery really grabs your attention from the text even when you try hard to concentrate to read the posts. And reading isn't helped with the fact that the white text on dark background is not really ideal for reading from screen (though it is good for presentations) and in some places there is not really enough contrast between text and bacground for easy reading in the first place. Try not to overlap photo-realistic background and text, and make sure there is enough contrast between text and background to not make reading too difficult and tiresome.

Reducing the blog loading time

As mentioned in the original web usability mistakes commentary, users will not give your blog too many seconds to load before they start giving up and moving elsewhere. Even a small extra waiting time can frustrate some users enough that they decide not to become your regular followers. Blogger help gives some easy steps to make sure that you Blogger blog will load as fast as possible, like reducing the number and size of images, hosting full-sized images in different service, putting custom css on top of the page and the number of posts displayed on the blogs main page. By some experimentation, and using Stopwatch (a nice service to measure loading times of web pages), I found out that trimming the posts displayed in Usability Spot main page from 7 posts to 5 posts decreased the loading time from 5-6 seconds to 3-4 seconds. It may not sound like much, but trimming two seconds from average page loading time can make all the difference between a happy user with good user experience and unhappy user with bad user experience. Google also has a good collection of articles and tools about web performance, loading time related issues and generally about making the web faster.