What helps me browse a personal website

Nota: Some may find this article controversial or will disagree with my preferences. Please remember: this article is about my preferences for what I like to see / find on personal websites and blogs. It is definitely not “the truth” about “how to make a good personal site”. Actually, there is no general truth about it, even more so if you don’t care about SEO and all these crap.

Introduction

I am a big fan of personal blogs and small website from actual people, and I’m always looking for more to add to my feed reader. Lately, I’ve been looking a lot at sites from multiple Clubs, Webrings and blogrolls. And the more I looked at those, the more I realized there are things that help during their discovery. I was always trying to find the same type information or pages. So I thought it would be a good idea to put together a small list (which, as usual with me, transformed into a long blog post…) of the things I like to find on blogs and what is driving me to click more and maybe add the blog to my feed reader.

This isn’t meant to be a list of “the perfect personal website”, just a list of things that help, at least me, discover faster/better a blogger’s universe. I’m fully aware that these points may sound wrong to others, they represent only personal opinion on that matter.

One point that I’m not going to address at all here: the content itself. Of course, this is the main key part. If I have no interest in ANY of the posts, I won’t add them to my feed reader, even if everything else seems to my taste. But content “interest” and “quality” is subjective, so for the rest of this post, let’s assume that I like at least some of the content of said sites (granted I’m able to find easily their content).

The other point that I won’t discuss in this post is the design. UX / Design, even more so than content, is subjective. And the point is not about “do I like the theme/colorsheme?”. But what I’m looking for to easily browse and discover a fellow blogger’s universe.

Homepage

Ideally, I would like to see some content here, whatever they are. It could be the X latest, a manually selected list of featured articles, a mix of different content types… Just title or showing a description and tags… Anything that will give me an idea of what you usually write about.

The homepage could also contains a short bio as a nice touch, but if you have it within your about page, that’s enough for me.

I like less homepages that shows a list of full content, because it is more difficult to have a quick overview. If there is an “archive” or similar page that show only titles (with or without a summary) elsewhere, that’s fine too. But if the only way to quickly have an overview of the available content is to scroll madly, it makes it tough for visitors to grasp the global idea of what the site is about. In that case, either the first 2 or 3 articles are interesting and I add the feed to my reader, or I usually give up…

Some example I like:

• Minimalist: Ersei’s homepage is really minimalist with an intro and some contact links, or Sophie’s that have a short bio and the title or the last 3 posts.
• Focused on presentation: I like that Sara has an extensive presentation on their homepage, like Michael Stapelberg
• Focused on content: Xe only list published articles like shellsharks or Drew DeVault (with their bio on the right side)
• Mix: bt’s homepage displays a bio and then the latest article. Chris McLeod has a more graphic and visual homepage with a hero banner, a bio and then latest posts. Henrique Dias also has a nice mix with a bio and an extract of the latest article of each type of posts available on their site

There is no “one way” to do it, as shown in these different example, but these example all show enough to keep on browsing.

Archive / listing page

If the homepage lists all content titles (with or without summary, but not full the full content), you don’t really need an archive / listing page. But if it only list a few content and / or full article content, an archive page is really helpful. That’s the only way to have a quick overview and quickly decide if I want to add your site to my feed reader.

I can be brutally minimalist like Hugo Landau, Alex Ellis or Chris Wiegman or a timeline like Tiff’s. Or something in the middle with a bit more contant and images like grgml or Michael Stapelberg.

If you write multiple type of content, it is better to have a page to list them separately, even if your main listing page shows them all together. Good example of that are Lars Christian’s or Henrique Dias’s blog. It helps, at least me, understand which content might interest me the most, if not all.

RSS feeds

Well, if a site wants visitors like me to know when a new content is published, the best is to provide a feed. It could be one, multiple or all of the standard web feeds: atom, RSS, H-feed (IndieWeb), JSON feed(s), etc… But asking your visitor to bookmark your site and come back regularly is definitely not a good option (at least for me).

In term of the feed content, I do prefer if the feed contains the full content, but I’m ok with just a description. My RSS reader (miniflux) has a “download” button that most of the time managed to retrieve the full content without me going to the actual page anyway :). And if the title and description are catching my attention, I will click to open the site if no other option.

If the site publish different type of content (eg: blog posts, short notes, bookmarks, …), it is nice to provide a feed for each separately, and possibly, a global one containing everything. It is more likely that people are interested in a subset than everything all the time. And even if I want to subscribe to all feeds, I may want to categorized the feeds in different categories in my reader (eg: bookmarks feeds are in a different category than blog posts).

To push it even further, you can pimp your RSS to make it viewable in a browser in a nice format. For example, look at one of my RSS feed, you can see it is fully readable within a web browser. Read more about on Robb Knight blog. To be fair, this isn’t at all important, just an eye candy thing.

Content page

On the (full) content page itself, I really want to see the date the article was published on! And / or the date of the latest update.

It has to be displayed somewhere! Even more so for tech related blog posts, but for others too. It is important to me to see when an article was written. You can edit posts and change their date or just show an edit message. But it is important information to have somewhere, dare I say critical in some rare cases. I’m not saying that I won’t read old article, but this helps with contexts.

Tags and / or categories are always nice but not critical. If they are shown, a link to a page that lists all content related to the tag is nice. Might be even great to have a dedicated feed per tags, but that’s just a cherry on top of the cake :).

As said, I won’t discuss about the content itself or its quality as this is way too subjective.

Content “velocity”

Side note about publishing schedule: in short, I don’t care about that at all… I still look at the latest post date to see if the blog is dead or not. But as long as there is at least 1 post in the past year or 2, I’m ok with it.

About page

On about page, a short description, if not already available on the homepage, is always interesting to read. It helps understanding the blogger’s universe and add some context around some of the articles.

More importantly (again, for me), having ways of contacting the author if they agree to be contacted of course! In the case an author does not want to be contacted, indicating it is also important, so people don’t send anything if they find a way to do so (eg: by finding the author on social media). I don’t care about the contact method, though I do prefer emails and webmentions. If the author has any preferences to contact them (channel, how to address them, etc…), it’s good to have them listed we can reach out to them the right way.

Menus / links

Just a quick list of things I prefer regarding menus. Nothing major here that would make me stop browsing a site, but quality of life browsing tips:

• Menu item should be fully written. With or without emoji, but not emoji alone. It is often hard to understand what an icon means…
• I’m ok with multiple menus, but I do like having one available at the top of the page, even if just a minimal one with a more complete one at the bottom. At the bottom means I must either read the full content or scroll for nothing.
• A link to the homepage (or the parent page) from any pages is always helpful

Conclusion

This post, as usual, is way longer than expected… Again, this is not a “TODO list” of things that people must implement on a personal website (after all, that’s their home on the web, they can decorate it the way they like!), but more a list of my personal preferences… They are subjective and might not be surprising for anyone that browse my site because what I’ve done here is based on my own preferences, so no wonder I checked most of the boxes…

And you, what do you like finding on such personal sites?