A few months ago I was chatting with Dunstan about some navigation changes he was making on his site and I started thinking hard about the standard navigation elements on a blog.
Most blogs have these standard internal navigation elements:
- Archives by month/week
- Categories
- Search
- Calendar
Other common elements that aren’t quite as universal are:
- Previous/Next post navigation
- Previous/Next page navigation
- Latest posts
- Latest comments
Let’s have an informal poll: which of these do you find yourself using on sites you visit?
If it’s a list of latest comments then I use the ones on my site as if there was no tomorrow. I use search a lot, and from time to time I’ll use categories to find more intesreting stuff of the same vein.
I never use the calendar.
I think everyone should have an About page … really.
That, a syndication feed, and an integrated commenting system seem to be all that I care about these days.
I also think that Greg Knauss’s Standard for Site Organization should be followed.
Geof, that’s cool info but I think you’re getting off the point a little. My question is not about features a site should have; I’m asking which of the navigation elements listed above you use when visiting someone’s blog.
i am using
search and categories and latest commons on other sites. i never use the calender (but it looks good on most sites) 😎
I tend to use things in this priority order:
Recent posts
Next/prev post
Categories
I generally don’t use archives by month or the calendar.
I just use whatever the RSS feed gives me. Recent posts and their comments. I like the idea of categories though, I want to add them to my site eventually.
Well actually I do use the calendar, I just don’t interact with it. But if it’s there it’s a quick indication of how often the site is updated (without having to look at and compare dates).
Essentially that’s the same reason I’ve got a calendar on my site.
I do the same thing, and I use the categories in a similar way: it gives me an idea of what the person is writing about thought I rarely click on one of them.
In my most used order: recent posts, recent comments, categories. I don’t think I’ve ever found mself using the calendar or dated archives (though I do use the date archive on my site).
I am not sure if all the blogs have it…but some of them list the bloggers names …this can be also an important navigation type.