Blog design tip: be helpful

Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fog Creek Software and author of Joel on Software, explores an interesting usability concept in his most recent blog re-design.  He is now using his blog’s left column as an intro for first-time users.  He says he was inspired by Jakob Nielsen’s post on weblog usability.

The trouble [with having “a lot of links and little graphic blobs and other bits and pieces of
the flotsam and jetsam that bloggers like to put in their marginalia
that links to other stuff”] was that new users would land on my site, having followed a
link from somewhere, and they would have absolutely no idea what was
going on. They were on some kind of site, there was this guy, Joel, he
was saying things, so what? The home page, like the home page of many
blogs, wasn’t really serving first-time visitors.

Great, especially for those whose blog traffic comes mostly from new uniques, such as referrals from the search engines.

Will try this sometime.