Conjurer of internet magic

It's time to put an end to bad blog page navigation buttons.  Tumblr blogs are probably the worst offender of them all since I read 10 Tumblr blogs for every 1 "other" kind of blog.  You're probably wondering what I'm talking about, so let me explain.  There are two offenses that I see.  The first offense is not having labels on the pagination buttons.  The other offense is using "Next" and "Previous" on pagination buttons.

The Wrong Way

No Labels
Not having labels on your pagination buttons could possibly be the worst thing ever.  I know that if I'm on page #1 that I have one choice to click, but what about any other page?  I would have to guess which button I want to use, and this usually means having to look at the status bar to see if the pages are going up or down.

Next/Previous Buttons
This is not nearly as annoying as not having labels on your pagination buttons, but it can still be quite confusing.  Here again, once I've gone to older content pages I now lose the context for what "next" and "previous" mean.  Does "next" mean the next newer page or the next older page?  To make this more confusing, some sites I've seen swap the words around so that "previous" means older and "next" means newer. Unless you have a page numbers sandwhiched between these two buttons for context stop using this method!

The Right Way

Older/Newer Buttons
Using the words "older" and "newer" provide the right amount of context.  These words let the user know which way they want to go on the blog regardless of if they started on page 9 or page 1.