The most egregious offense of color formatting to me is white text on a black background… it freaks out my aging eyes. The other examples that Roch gave, such as text of differing colors, I really haven’t noticed so much the past few years, but it could be that I’m just looking at the wrong sites. He’s right though - those sorts of things are more distracting than anythng else.

If I have to strain to read something, I usually give up after the first few sentences, at best. No matter how great your content is, you’ve lost your audience at the outset if the physical readability suffers.

I think that most of the Nielsen list definitely falls under the category “Personal Preferences.” But I like the idea of a category on the sidebar for posts that have recent comments.

I would add a few more of my own:

Avoid meaningless links
Linking the word “capitalism” to a picture of a stack of money is nothing more than a distraction — a false start for your reader. You might think you are being clever by linking the word “dream” to a picture of Rosie Perez, but if Rosie isn’t relevant to your topic, you are just misleading your reader. Make links relevant or don’t link at all.

Understand and use paragraphs
If you want to experiment with form, fine. Have at it. It’s your blog. If you want to communicate your ideas effectively, use meaningful paragraphs. Writing each sentence as its own paragraph is annoying; so is writing an entire post as a single paragraph. Both make it hard on the reader and scream: “Warning: Extra effort required.”

Paragraphs are aids to understanding for your readers. They give readers clues about when you are moving from one thought to another and make a post easier to follow. If you don’t understand, start reading with attention to paragraphs. You will soon see how people effectively use paragraphs.

Using paragraphs will make you a better writer too. If you aren’t organizing your thoughts into paragraphs, chances are you aren’t organizing your thoughts at all.

Avoid unnecessary formatting
Using bold, block quotes, colors and different fonts to present your information in a manner that helps give organizational clues to your readers is good. (Subheadings, for example.) Filling a post with colors and font styles just because you can is a distraction. You might think you are being cute by making the word “money” green, but trust me, that’s old, tired, and distracts from the meaning of your words. Use formatting sparingly and only to give some real additional information to your readers.

As I said above, it’s your blog. You can break all the “rules” if you want, but if you want to communicate effectively, some ways are better than others.