Names on pages
It seems to happen fairly often lately:
I'll follow a link and find myself at someone's blog. It's an attractive and nicely laid-out blog, it's clearly been running for a while, it's updated frequently, it says interesting things. It has a title; it has an author photo; it has a means of contacting the author. It's only missing one thing: the author's name.
Or pseudonym. I know there are people who don't want their real names on the web; that's fine by me. I'm just saying, there ought to be some name by which one can mentally refer to the author.
And in most of these cases, it's clearly not a privacy issue; for example, the email address when you click the "Contact me" link often contains part or all of the author's name. The missing info generally appears to be mostly a question of the author not realizing that someone who doesn't already know who they are might see the blog.
In fact, I would go further than just suggesting including your name: I would say that blogs ought generally to have an "about the author" or "about this blog" page, with a prominent link to that page from the main page. Even more generally, I would say that almost all sites (of any kind) should have some kind of About page, prominently linked.
My real point here is: if you have a web page or site, whether personal or organizational, take a look at it and think about it from the point of view of someone who doesn't know you and has never seen the page before. If they want to know more about you or the organization, is there an obvious way for them to find out that information? If not, and if you're not intentionally avoiding providing any information about yourself, I recommend adding an About page and linking to it.
