The features that a blog must possess in 2013

I remember the days of my early blogging days. I do not need to go back to extreme history to remind this and I can realize the kind of excitement I used to have toward exploring every new thing here and also trying to have it on my blog. While I feel the excitement , I also know that many bloggers do spend a lot of time trying to do things that are not going to help them at all. Trying to have a fancy blog without any application on creating quality content will always lead to waste of the most useful time. A blog is primarily about content and other feature support them. I personally believe that a blog should possess all essential features and not too many things. This article is all about the features that a blog must possess in 2013.

Goal of blog feature management and this article

While we understand the most essential features for a blog , Understanding the goal from this is important. Our goal from having features is to facilitate various actions taken by readers and increase the usability. The goal for adding features is not to have something fancy that even does not load in some cases.



Image source and license information

Understand the feature set for a blog

Every time you add new features like share buttons and other widgets, the pages of your blog and the entire blog layout gets some additional size and HTTP request. For increasing usability of your blog you have to make sure that your blog should offer pages with least possible HTTP request and size. When you add services from external platforms e.g Add This , Share This , Disqus widget or any other such features , you add on to make your pages larger in size. These platform collect data from your visitors and to do this they load large JavaScript files that increase the page size of your blogs.

Just imagine that why Google , Facebook , Wikipedia and other large websites load faster , this is because they have least needed features on a single page . In some cases they have many features that work together on a single page but you must also understand that they have the kind of technology and servers that can take care of the rest. Google home page , Facebook home page and Wikipedia pages are always lightweight in size and have least possible HTTP request.

Just understand that your users do not use al features but all the feature load when they open a page from your blog. I do not say that your blog must not have any feature or widget but keep it to least needed. Do not put everything on your blog that you come across.

Right approach to adding features in your blog

The right approach for having a feature set for your blog is all about the things mentioned below;
#1. Understand the users that will be using your blog and their geographical locations; If your users are located in  geographical areas with possible high bandwidth connections then it is fine but if you have users from areas with low bandwidth connections you have to mind them.

#2. Keeping page size to small will be fine for all users but large page sizes will only suit few users. Every user is not having similar configuration of internet connection and system.

#3. Understand that every widget and everything will add to your page size to some scale.

#4. Before creating a blog you must be clear about the feature your blog needs.

#5. Use Page Speed, Yslow before and after adding and removing Ads and widgets to your blog. I recommend using GTmetrix – a free online service for this.

#6. Avoid using fancy widgets, images and videos , too much advertising on your blog layout.

#7. Have more text links than images or buttons for various option on your blog . This is also good for SEO of your blog.

Must have features for a blog

Few must have blog features are below;

#1. Name , Logo of your blog

#2. A search box

#3. A simple menu that works with every browser and links to every important topic, post , category , label etc.. Many fancy menus do not work with old browsers.

#4. Links to subscriptions offered by you. Feed , Facebook , Twitter , Google Plus are the most common and recommended , others have limited use.

#5. Links or buttons to share your pages and posts on social media. The page  size must be considered before adding these buttons on your blog because these button use complex Java Scripts that add to page sizes. Popular social media platforms use content delivery network to serve these files and sue to their popularity many of these files are already in the cache of the browsers of your visitors but this is about Facebook ,  Twitters , Liked In, Google Plus , Pinterest and such other platforms. Every platform is not popular, so make sure that you have limited sharing buttons.

#6. Related posts, popular post, trending posts, recent posts , labels , archive and other such widget for readers to find the right topic for them. These widgets do not add to the page size much but increase the usability of your blog and also take care of the SEO aspect of your blog.

#7. An HTML site map that is meant for your users.

#8. A description page for your blog.