I began by taking a look at the sidebar on this blog and decided a cleaning excercise was definitely overdue (and is still in progress). As well as removing things I wanted to add a few too. So far, here is what I've been doing.

RSS Feeds - The other day I decided to clear up my Firefox bookmarks. The sites I visit regularly would be added to my RSS subscriptions in Newsgator, my RSS reader of choice. I couldn't believe how difficult some sites make this process, or the number of broken links to feeds. It's quite incredible that some really high profile sites (with large subscriber bases) give so little thought to how easy or otherwise it is to subscribe or even find their feeds. Bearing in mind that there are a lot of people who are novices in this area who won't look too hard or even know that there is a subscription option will lose you a lot of potential audience. I won't mention any names but some A-List bloggers fall down quite badly in this area as well as plenty of other good quality blogs.

If your site is guilty of this, I strongly recommend that you implement a fix - make your subscription options clear and give them prominence. My own RSS feeds and subscription options were easily found, but looked very untidy and were taking up far too much space and hopefully the new look is much better - I removed two other subscription options and replaced them with an email subscription choice served by Feedburner.  

Site Translation -   This was a task I'd long been intending to get around to. If you see a lot of visitors from non-English speaking countries you really should consider it too. As an English speaker I am typically narrow minded about language barriers but looking at my stats, a lot of traffic from non-English speaking areas meant that I could be doing a lot more to help them out and hopefully get them to stay on my site for a bit longer than a cursory glance. 

Once again, there isn't much point in keeping your translation options hidden away, so give them prime position. I knew nothing about  the options available, nor anything about implementing them. If you fall into that camp you will find some excellent information on this page at Digital Inspiration that will, in turn lead you to most available resources.

My solution for these pages was not the optimal choice, but, all things considered it's a vast improvement on nothing at all. I'm sure that some of the machine translations are pretty horrible, I'm not qualified to check them, but hopefully they will be easier to understand for those whose English is very limited.

Browser Compatibility - a few days ago I was working at someone else's business and had cause to use their computer. I'm a long time Firefox fan but this machine happened to be running IE6. One of my Wordpress sites looked like a train wreck! As it had always looked fine in IE7 it didn't occur to me that older versions would cause display problems. As of this moment, no definitive fix has been found and, to be honest I'm tired of looking for it so I bodged a quick disclaimer on the site advising that IE7 is required to view the site properly. I can see people cringing but I just don't have the time or inclination to fix my site for old browser versions anymore, particularly IE.

This did lead me to a very useful site however - take a look at Browsershots.org to check how your sites appear in most of browsers in use today. Simply type in your URL, bookmark the resulting page, give the site 4hours or so and go back and see how you stack up.

I still have much to update, and I shall be looking closely at the poorer performing sponsor ads on these pages, some of which are VERY surprising (to me at least) but illustrate the importance of tracking links and periodically tweaking promotions and clearing out the chaff.

TCH

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