Building a more user-friendly WordPress site

While programs like WordPress make building a site faster and easier, it's still not perfect.  Although technology rapidly improves, human judgment (and misjudgment) will always have the final say in how a website looks.

Bob Dunn, a WordPress developer in Seattle, gave this presentation at a WordCamp: How to Attract More Readers with a User-Friendly WordPress Site.  The link is to a video of his talk.

I thought Dunn's advice on "About" pages was particularly useful (hint: starts at 20:43 in the video). For myself, I get a little annoyed when an "About Me" page doesn't have a photo of the blogger.  Like Dunn says, "you want to know the person behind the words."

A lot of Dunn's material consists of tips on usability.  It's ironic that we're all Internet users, but when we start building websites, we often make them extremely cumbersome.  Or was that just me?  I remember the bad old days when I was excited about embedding every kind of widget on the planet into my blog.  Thankfully, I've matured since then.