Blogs and RSS Buttons
April 9, 2008
In my industry everyone knows what an RSS button is for. Outside…in the real world…most people don’t have a clue. In fact, it’s confusing and clicking on it could be a catastrophe to someone that is not computer savvy. My thoughts on this though is too bad. Teach your users what it is and let them decide whether or not they want to use it.
Here’s my scenario…I volunteered to build a site for our local pop warner football association. It turned into adding sites for track and cheer as well. All of these were built on our Wordpress platform (the one that kicks ass). Anyway, I had a GoTo meeting to do some training with the moms that had volunteered to run the sites. Hands down, they hated the RSS button. They wanted it gone and didn’t care that it offered a feature to users that subscribe to feeds. They said that they had received phone calls from parents complaining because "they clicked on it and ended up on another site, then they couldn’t figure out how to get back".
So fine, we took it off.
This really frustrated me because I enjoy teaching people about the internet and 99% of the time everyone is very receptive to the learning. So when a group puts up the hand to one of the best things to come out of Web 2.0 it blows me away. Whatever.
The way I see it the button should be displayed prominently at the top of your blog kinda like how it is on mine:) I can’t stand it when I spend 10-30 seconds trying to find an RSS button.
The worst are the blogs that have it in a text link at the very bottom where you can barely see it like this:
I’ve built a few feeds in my day and trying to find the feed button is very difficult most of the time. I have found blogs that are actually SEM blogs and they don’t have a button at all.
So please, if you have a blog display your RSS button at the top so it’s easy for your visitors to subscribe. Just slap it up there and who knows, you may be pleased at the results.
Posted in Rants
April 9th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
I don’t know what I’d do without an RSS feed, to click on and subscribe and having one for my readers. I agree with what you said that folks should just learn about it and then decide if it is for them. Chances are, they will see the value and keep it.
April 9th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Great read. I’ve have both RSS and email buttons up on my blog. Not many subscribers yet, but I’m hopeful. To not use it because some folks are confused seems like a crime. Folks that are reading blogs intentionally will know about RSS. At least putting up a Feedburner icon for the emails would be good.
Thanks for the interesting read.
April 11th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Good post. I never thought about exactly where it should be placed, especially since I use Google Reader and just put the url of the site I want to subscribe to in their subscribe field. But it makes sense.
And I have tried and tried to get my dad, who loves to read blogs, to start using some feed reader, but he insists he likes to “cruise.” I quit bugging him.
April 13th, 2008 at 10:44 am
I feel your pain! lol
My wife calls it a “page full of useless code” (she here’s me talking about html code once in a while but has no idea what it is). I had to explain to her what it’s purpose is, why it is so crucial and wonderful and so on. But now she has her own reader set up and lvoes the fact that she can simply check one place for updates on all the sites she likes.
Great post Barbara, I really needed a good laugh today! So, thank you.