Reading the graphic it is possible to deduce the following:

1 After an initial flat phase I changed the position of the "Feeds" logo from the bottom of the website to the top. The resulting effect was the first big jump in subscriptions (around 300% in less than a month).

2 After a second "flatish" short period (second, bigger bubble on image 1) I added some instructions to the RSS Feed logo: "Subscribe to Feed, get every week fresh articles"

Lesson

A Put the tools the people need and you want to promote in a prominent position, do not assume that users will look for them.

B Tell users what you are actually offering, do not rely on images and icons. Telling people that the Design vs Art Blog is updated every week is encouraging them to subscribe.

C This tips have a marketing impact but they could be applied to everything that is on a website, potentially improving usability with a few changes.      

1. Default color. By default the old WordPress interface used to come with a horrible strong blue. The new one comes with a web2.0 pastel palette. This is something that our eyes can be happy about.

2. Wording. If a feature or button is not labeled properly users are going to have a hard time finding it or discovering what this feature is for. An example is the "Presentation" tab on the old wordpress administration that was hiding the design-related features of the blog. I remember having some trouble to find this features the first time I used WordPress. Now the tab is called "Design". Great!

3. Organization. A good little move to improve usability was to reorganize the menu. Write, Manage, Design and Comments are on the left, the rest was move to another corner. This puts the important stuff together and makes the administration page look simpler.

Use links, but don’t abuse.

"A common problem is that users do not understand where the link could go…"

It’s important to pay attention on the way these links are done. A common problem is that users do not understand where the link could go. On the example below, taken from News.com, it’s clear for most users that clicking on "struck licensing agreements" would link to an article about that. On the other hand, clicking on "Imeem", would take the user to the company’s website or to other news about it?

The New York Times goes one step forward making embedded links more understandable, predictable and user friendly. As the user hover over the candidates’ names in this politics article, the link label appears telling users that they would be taken to more articles about that candidate. Using proper link labeling improves usability and avoid confusion. (Mouse arrow is not displayed).

Note that the Register button is not visible, users must drug the window (although that might depend on the screen configuration). This adds one more usability flaw to this interface.Then another floating window to post the comment:

Techcrunch, the famous blog, has a much more practical solution for posting comments. I will go for simple solutions, allowing users to post straight away.

The good thing: in the last weeks MyBlogLog was having problems with the login but this was recently fixed. In my opinion is very cool to be able to login with the Yahoo! ID, after all, we are already using that to login into many services (as Yahoo! becomes bigger and buys more and more companies).

The bad thing: in my opinion MyBlogLog has a few design and usability problems to resolve. For example completing my profile was quite hard task with a not very good looking form:

I have noticed in many parts of the site that they use some terminology that not everybody understands. That would be not that bad is they would include some kind of online help, but they don’t. Is opt-in and opt-out clear to everybody?

They also try to explain the users things that they probably don’t want to know about, using maybe too technical terminology:

“To opt-out of data collection from MyBlogLog, click on the button below. Please note that when you do so, our system will set the following cookie: “mbl_sid=Nxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” in your browser. The capital letter N simply means “do not collect my data”.”

Another thing you should keep in mind when designing your site is to try to explain what the different sections are for. In this example, I clicked on My Account > Services, but MyBlogLog does not explain why they want my other services’ accounts or in which way filling this information will be beneficial to me.

In general, I like MyBlogLog, they have a cool service and I added their widget to my blog. On the other side, I think they could improve their service from the interface and usability point of view.

Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out some usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice.

I landed to the sign up page when I clicked on another site, and the procedure is extremely easy, you only have to fill the shortest form ever with your blog’s address or feed URL and your email address. That’s it! Then you have your blog’s mobile version created.

The feedm8 design is not flawless, although the problems are not big. For example, when I was navigating my account I got this message telling me to click on the “Promote” icon to, obviously, promote my blog.

But I could not find that Promote icon so easily, it took me some time to discover that the Promote icon was a star with an arrow on it (?).

This how this blogs looks like on feedm8:

I like feedm8 because it is so easy to set up and use. They have done a good design work.

I landed to Andy Moore’s site, a dotMobi Certified Mobile Web Developer who has been working with the mobile internet for some time (as he says on his home page). Andy has developed a nice plugin for WordPress to automatically create a mobile version of WordPress blogs.

The plugin is very easy to install and once you do it displays a “WordPress Mobile” configuration tab where you can change many settings for your blog’s mobile version like the use of CSS, mobile posting and tracking configurations.

Click here to see Design vs Art Blog Mobile Version on an emulator

The plugin comes with AdMob Mobile Internet Advertising ads embedded that you can set with your own publisher ID. This is a great feature as you can enable ads on your blog’s mobile version without any extra settings. The plugin creator, Andi Moore, asks you to share the earnings with him and he also embedded this  feature into the plugin but lets you decide how much would you like to share. This is something you can get rid of if you get into the code but to be honest sharing a little bit with somebody that is making your life easier is totally fine.

In my opinion the design of the mobile version of your site is quite OK if you are more interested in the content, but Andy says that you can always modify the CSS file. Navigation and usability are fine and adds do not disturb at all. It is worth giving a try!