Not every visitor interacts with your blog in the same way. Some people use non-standard browsers to read your content. Others may not be able to understand English. And, of course, not all of your visitors are human. By failing to consider these atypical visitors in your design, your blog may be turning them off before they’ve even had a chance to hear what you have to say. Here are a few atypical visitors you may want to consider, and how you can design to accommodate them.
Disabled Users
Some of the visitors to your blog may be blind, deaf, or otherwise impaired. It’s important not to alienate them by providing your content in a purely visual or auditory format, or by making your site impossible to navigate from a keyboard.
Here are a few tips. If you use images, make sure to provide descriptive alt text. If you do podcasts, consider offering transcripts. And, if you use script-based navigation (e.g., Flash or JavaScript), make sure your site can still be browsed with scripting disabled.
By making sure your blog can be enjoyed through a screen reader, with the sound turned off, and without using a mouse, you’ll be on the right track to endearing yourself to your disabled visitors. To learn more, check out the US government’s guidelines for Section 508 compliance.
Search Engine Spiders
As Matt Cutts mentioned a few weeks ago, search engine spiders are a lot like visually-impaired users. They can only interpret the textual elements of your blog outside of its visual context and have difficulty following complex script-based navigation. Of course, unless you want marginal search engine placement, you’ll want to make sure they can read and navigate your blog as effectively as possible.
As with disabled users, good alt text is key to giving search engine spiders an understanding of your visual media. To allow spiders to properly crawl your blog, it’s also a good idea to provide a sitemap containing text links to every page. By placing a link to this sitemap in the common footer, search engine spiders will be able to reach every page on your blog from every other page, regardless of how your standard navigation is set up.
Users of Different Browsers
Basic browser compatibility requires that you test your site on Firefox and Internet Explorer 6 and 7, which account for about 90% of all users at the time of this post. If you want to take your compatibility a step further, you should also test on Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer 5, and the Mozilla Suite (Gecko and Netscape), which will bring you to about 98%.
Even if you do that, though, the remaining 2% (one out of every 50 visitors to your blog) won’t be using a mainstream browser. On top of that, 6% of web users do not have JavaScript enabled. Others users may not even have Flash installed or up to date.
To deal with this, consider the HTML and scripting elements that go into your design. If you use a CSS layout, for example, make sure that it degrades gracefully on browsers that don’t support it. Also bear in mind that minor mistakes in coding, which are often “corrected” in mainstream browsers, can wreak havoc in an older browser. Running your blog through the W3C markup validator can clue you in to these sorts of problems.
Foreign Users
Although English is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world, it isn’t the only one by a long shot. Some visitors to your site may have little or no understanding of it. Particularly if your blog has any sort of international appeal, then, it can help to consider offering an easy translation utility to keep your foreign visitors interested, such as a free WordPress plugin or theTranslator Pro, which is a paid alternative.
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