My blog reviewed
Recently Randa Clay at Randa Clay Design held a Pimp My Blog contest. I already had Randa in my list of blogs that I read and was also subscribed to her RSS feed, so I entered the contest. I was pleasantly surprised (and a bit nervous) to receive an email from Randa letting me know that I had won a blog review.
I had told Randa that I was interested in growing the readership of my blog. Randa observed that most of my post are personal and that the blog would need to have more focus if I am to provide value outside a small circle of family and friends. I can relate to this, as many times I do not put a great deal of effort into posting more than ‘this happened today’ type posts. I’ll have to think about how best to achieve this.
Randa suggested that migrating to WordPress with a sharp theme would be a improvement on the design side. I’m not a designer, so I don’t know what specifically doesn’t work, but the migration to WordPress is something that I have been considering for a while.
You can read Randa’s full review of Failure is the Key to Success on her blog. Thanks for the review Randa and your useful suggestions. I will try to incorporate them in the coming weeks.
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September 9th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
It was my pleasure Ian. What I was referring to design-wise was not that your current design doesn’t work- it functions well, but just that it doesn’t really have much “design” per se. I would suggest you bring your name and your header graphic into one image that goes across the top of the page for example, but I don’t know how limited you are with Thingamablog.
September 9th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Any lack of design is the techie in me. You should have seen it before David Airey’s suggestions earlier this year (or on the other hand maybe you shouldn’t).
Making a single image across the top is quite possible. If it can be done using html and css, it can be done in Thingamablog. I’ll take that idea on board.
Thanks,
Ian
September 9th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Randa was very tactful in her review, wasn’t she? I don’t mind your layout now that you have improved some things. People seem to like Wordpress and it has been suggested that I change to it too. But I am too scared and haven’t had too many problems with Blogger.
As to content. That is the big question, isn’t it? Only you can decide that. One medblog that I read has his three basic rules of blogging which he expounds here. I hope that link works. They are simply:
Dinosaur’s Blogging Rules
* Write well.
* Say something.
* Mix it up.
although he expounds it well in the post linked above.
It doesn’t seem to have worked from the preview so I will copy the URL here:
http://dinosaurmusings.blogspot.com/2006/11/blogging-101.html
September 9th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Hi jmb,
I think it was a more generous review than I expected. The current layout has come a long way since the version 6 months ago and seems to work fairly well.
I am currently looking at what would be involved in a migration to WordPress, but it won’t be for some time yet.
Ultimately it comes down to content, you can have the best looking blog, but if you don’t have the content, then it doesn’t really matter. So, at the moment, that is where I need to concentrate. I like the Blogging 101 link that you posted.
Regards,
Ian