One of the most annoying disadvantage of blogging is that as you keep posting new posts some of the most useful and popular posts get buried in the archive . Except regular readers, it is almost impossible for new visitors to know about your best blog post. Since not many people are keen to search for the best content of a blog, unless we don’t make some effort to showcase our best blog posts on the front page itself , it would be almost impossible to let new visitors know about those post. This, in my opinion, is a very bad usability aspect of a blog style site.
One of the alternative to overcome this is to use the plugin ‘Popularity Contest’ which display a list of most popular posts of our blog in the sidebar. This, though helps a bit, is not the best possible solution as the popularity of a blog post is dependent upon many factors beyond our control. From my own experience, I can say that this is not the best choice to showcase our best posts.
Second alternative is to use another plugin ‘Recommend It’ which allows your blog’s veteran readers to recommend posts to first time visitors through a simple voting system. It is being used very successfully on it’s main site here
However, the best alternative in my opinion is to build your blog like a static site where all the best popular posts find a permanent place in the sidebar. I recently came across a blogger (Caroline Middlebrook) who has written a wonderful free ebook on this subject. The name of this ebook is How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress.
I read this ebook and I must admit it is a very easy to understand & effective book that explains the process of building niche sites using wordpress. Using the simple tutorial given in this ebook anybody can increase the usability aspect of his blog. If you want to make your blog easily accessible to new readers, you must read this ebook.
