Key Blog Features

Here's a quick list of the features that my focus group seemed to care about the most: * Title and purpose. The test is - do your user's quickly know which category in their RSS reader to put your blog in?
* About page. Your about page can quickly help clarify the promise of your blog and setting expectations. See Skellie on How to Write the Perfect ‘About’ Page (by Numbers).
* Categories. Categories help your user's browse your catalog of posts in terms of key themes, as well as help clarify what your blog is really about. It's another visual cue.
* Search your blog. Even if you don't have a bunch of posts, users tend to rely on search. Once you have a bunch of posts, your search is vital. It's like a chicken and egg scenario though. If your search is tough to find, user's wont use it much. If it's easy to find and convenient, they'll use it more. Because there's so many ways to customize your search feature, the most important thing is to make it obvious that it is a search feature (and not a subscription form) and that it is scoped to your blog.
* Tag Cloud. Tag clouds are nice way to provide a topical browsing experience for your blog. There's two types -- internal and external. Internal tags (Wordpress 2.3 has built in support) help you slice up your body of posts in a more fine-grained way. External tags, such as Technorati tags, help showcase your posts in those social circles. For more information, see my post, Tags vs. Categories.
* Recent Comments and Recent Posts. Using Recent Posts and Recent Comments is an effective way to improve your user's experience and help user's discover your other posts, as well as show signs of life.
* Browse your posts. Your user's will browse your posts either by categories, tag clouds, searches, or related posts. Another entry point is Recent Comments and Recent Posts. Another approach is to create pages that organize your posts in alternate ways.
* Subscribe by RSS. If a user likes your blog, it should be easy for them to subscribe. Most blog themes I experimented with either exposed RSS in the right place, or it was easy to add.
* Subscribe by email. None of the templates that I experimented with exposed this by default, so it can be easy to forget about. Some of my users pointed this out, so I tested adding subscribe by email.
* Comments. One thing that my user's pointed out to me was how they like when they can scan posts and quickly see the comment information beneath the post titles, rather than at the end of the posts. A few users pointed this out so this seems to be a common preference. I noticed some themes did a better job than others of showcasing the comments for each post. The key decisions are whether to show links above the post or at the end of the post, along with what font and color. Once you're actually looking at the comments, the quick scan test will tell you how readable the comments are. Actually add some comments yourself so you can find any surprises.