PermaLinks are “permanent links” to blog posts. Theoretically, PermaLinks will exist forever, so readers can come back to your blog in fifty years and read the same post at that same address. When you’re setting up your link structure, make sure your links are named something that will always make sense to you. Later, when you’re looking at a link’s structure, how do you know which post is about banana pudding? Is it called domain.com/id=?2149823 or is it domain.com/banana-pudding.html? Take care when you’re permanently linking to articles.
“Linkrot,” a term for links that are no longer accessible but remain on a Web page because they were credible at one point, is another problem Web designers may encounter. Linkrot happens when information architects for other sites decide to change their link structure. URLs (Uniform Resource Indicators) point readers to any place on the Internet – from images to music files to Web sites. Designed by Tim-Berners Lee to make the World Wide Web accessible to anyone, URLs use a limited subset of ASCII characters so anyone with a keypad can access any content with a few keystrokes. If page addresses or site structures are changed, the URL system is unusable. Telling all the sites that link to a page to update their bookmarks is impractical. Redirection to another page only creates more confusion and is not always practical. The best way to combat linkrot is to think through URL structure before starting a patchy file management system. Link validators are also becoming more popular with webmasters; these tools perform a quick check on pages by queuing up all the links featured on a page. It will then alert the designer of any flawed links. You can type in your Web site address at the W3C site, and the validator will tell you if your links are broken.
How do you change your link structure? In WordPress, you click on the Options tab and choose PermaLinks. Change your structure to reflect whatever naming convention you prefer. I like /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/. That way, I know when I wrote the post and what it was about. For example, this post will be called 2005/09/30/whats-a-permalink. Isn’t that better than a string of numbers in a link?
The PermaLink structure on Blogger is already set up to be intuitive by default. That’s different from the way Blogger used to be. The PermaLink is automatically created with the tag like this: http://hiamanda.blogspot.com/2005/04/go-on.html. That’s the address, month, date and post name. Pretty neat!

“Sticky” means readers will come to your site and stay there. How do you do that?
Readers come to a site for three main reasons:

they are looking for something
they are trying to accomplish a task
they have five minutes to kill before their next meeting.

Bloggers believe they are making pages for the third type of user. They think users come to sites primarily to be entertained. We should be most concerned about how the readers can use our sites rather than focusing on what looks best or which color schemes are most fitting. While these aspects play a role in the user experience, even the most beautifully designed page can be useless if relevant information is difficult to find.
Jakob Nielsen, often touted as an authoritative Web design guru, recently modified his definition of a standardization levels. He groups Web design elements into the following categories:

• A standard is a used by 80 percent or more of Web sites. Here, users have come to expect all sites to always work the same. When new sites do not operate like the ones they are used to viewing, users navigate away from the page.
• Conventions are included in 50 to 79 percent of Web sites. Users expect to see conventions because sites usually work in one way.
• The final category, confusion, includes elements that are not yet fully developed. Less than half of the large sites have figured out a common way to show information in these fields.

Don’t try to lay out your site in a novel, tricky way unless your idea is so great that perhaps the whole Web publishing industry would adopt your standard. Conventions are used for a reason. Here are a few different ways to handle navigation

This Web log will serve as an easily-accessible resource for journalists, citizen journalists and anyone else who wants to set up their own Web log. For people who want a private place where they can express themselves, this tech blog for the non-techie user should help.
Here are my suggestions for blogging software:

• WordPress: This is what I use, so I suppose I’m a little biased. The beauty of WordPress lies in its ability to house your content on your own server or Web space. If you have the money to buy a server (mine is $4.95 per month through Surpass Hosting), do it. You need a place for your information. If you put your pages on someone else’s server space, you’re taking a risk.
• Movable Type: Back in its heyday, Movable Type was amazing. Now, they’ve switched from a freeware site to a paid site with places for your pages on their Typepad servers.
• Blogger: Ah, yes, Blogger. This is by far the easiest publishing platform. When a reader with any experience with Blogger comes to your Blogger site, at a glance, they can tell you are using a template. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you want to build credibility and separate yourself from the masses, you need to tweak your template. That’s what I’m here for (hopefully).