Many people use tag clouds on their web sites to inject more “web 2.0″ into it these days. But does your site need one? and if it does, will it actually be helpful and usable, or just waste space?
Well, first, you need to consider a few things:
See whether your site really needs one
Don’t just include it because you can. Tag clouds work better on sites where users themselves tag its contents (like Flickr for example), or sites that use tags as the main method to navigate its contents. If your site is neither, then chances are you don’t need a tag cloud. Save up space for something more important.
Separate the tags
Use commas or put tags within buttons for example. Many sites use only spaces, which does more bad than good, because you wouldn’t be able to tell whether a tag has one or more words.
Make your tags readable and scannable
Typical tag clouds tend to use different font sizes, colors and/or font-weight to differentiate between popular and less popular tags. I don’t know about you, but I personally think that the only thing this degree of differentiation does is slow me down.
I get it. “Design” is very popular there.The best implementation of tag clouds I’ve seen to date is the one that MSDN blogs use. The difference between tags is small, yet recognizable. All tags have (almost) the same font size, and you can tell which ones weight more by how dark their color is (popular tags eventually get darker, bolder and a tiny bit bigger).
Know when and where to display them
When tags aren’t the main way of navigating your site’s contents, they become less important to users, and therefore should be given a less prominent placement in your layout.
For example: RetailMeNot.com has a search bar that is used as a start point for users to find coupons through the home page, yet they still placed a tag cloud on the top left of the page, even though it’s not as efficient (nor as usable) as the search bar. Sure, the tag clouds in any of their sub pages are useful to narrow down results, but it’s unnecessary in the homepage in my opinion.
If you’d like to read more on tag clouds, check out Smashing Magazine’s article, which digs deeper into tag clouds and their usage.