Over a year ago I went through the process of making my blog suck less, so it included all the essential WoW blogger info. I think I did a decent job for a baby blog of 2 months old. Recently I have been undergoing another round of self critiquing trying to build a better blog. I would love feedback. Here are some of the changes I've made:
1. Text background color. I have gotten some comments about the purple behind the body of my posts being too bright, so I toned it down a few shades. I want it to stay purple, but I really really want to know if it is more readable.
2. Font type and size. My computer at home and my computer at work have different font packages and apparently I was using an uncommon font. Heck, it's still showing differently in Google Chrome and Firefox, but it is less different. I also made the font size a little bigger for easier readability. It makes some of my old posts small, but I think I'm too lazy to go back and change all those.
3. Flavicon! This was surprisingly painful to do and I still can't get it to show up in Google Chrome. Suggestions? But for Firefox I am very very happy with it.
4. Cbox. These things are too much fun. I stole the idea from Averna's blog. Leave me a message!
5. Icon of my e-mail. It looks a lot better than the line-o-text I had buried at the bottom of the page and I put it in two locations for easier find-ability. I made it at Nexodyne.
6. Google Talk. Now you can chat with me through my g-mail account. You don't have to have g-mail to be able to do so. I figured this would be a nice option for readers who have questions but maybe don't feel comfortable leaving their question as a comment or want more instantaneous feedback than sending me an e-mail.
7. Search, Most Popular Posts, and Topic. Self explanatory, so you can find what you are looking for faster. I had topics listed before but the list was a little crazy long. I condensed where I could.
8. Changes to my Profiles. I shrunk the picture of my character, because you probably don't need two massive pictures of my HoT druid. I also added an IRL picture of myself to my IRL profile BEFORE the despite the Paladin Schmaladin drama. I think I'm going to keep it up anyway, however, I have a better one in the works!
9. Blogroll! My blogroll was horribly outdated. I actually subscribe to almost 50 blogs. I picked the 20 I read the most (partially because they post the most) and found out there is a convenient "show 10" feature that allows you the reader to see all the blogs listed with one click if you wish.
10. Blog Azeroth, Twisted Nether, and WoWJunction. I've been listed on the Twisted Nether for a long time (I did not submit my blog), but never advertised for them (which really was just rude of me) or did anything with my wiki page. Well, I fixed both of those. I also added an icon for Blog Azeroth and added myself to that page. The WoW blogging community really is an awesome community and I need to show my support more. Finally, WoWJunction is a new list of WoW sites. It has some nice search features and you can create an account and save sites to favorites.
resto druid. Once upon a time she was the spirit stacking tree for the main tank ToL aura. Despite all the spirit changes it is still the stat nearest to my heart.
I love the new changes, but I do have one suggestion. Right now your sidebar has so much stuff in it that it extends the page really far....so that your actual article only takes up about 50% of the page length. You might consider trimming a few things from it or making things such as the Blog Azeroth banner smaller. There are lots of fun things for sidebars, but eating up page length can be rather odd.
ReplyDeleteJust noticed something else you could do to shrink the sidebar length a bit. Have you looked into getting a tag cloud to show article labels? You seem to have a lot of labels so it could be time to switch to a different visual method for displaying them, instead of in a long list.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much Ice! I normally view 3 entries at a time, so I didn’t think of that. I made a few more changes, so now my side bar should be closer to the length of one article. I’m loving the cloud tags too. Exactly the type of feedback I was hoping for. Thank you again!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great advice! I've got a favicon and Google search now as well =)
ReplyDeleteI have very little constructive technical advice to offer, as I'm not so good with all that fancy stuff!
ReplyDeleteHowever, in the non-techinical area, for what it is worth, I very much like the way your blog looks and I adore the purple background! =)
I'm glad you like the purple. I LOVE purple. My boards at school and my living room wall are purple. My sexy WoW outfit is purple. So teh purple HAD to stay - I just wanted to make sure you could read posts.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad other people are getting ideas too. I totally went and took ideas from other blogs.
I'm still having favicon issues though... sometimes I can see them for some people in some places and sometimes I can't *sigh*
The favicon code is one line and really easy to add, but Blogger sometimes switches it back to the default orange B icon when it loads something new on the page. Mine is shown 95% of the time though! Link to the BA How-To:
ReplyDeletehttp://blogazeroth.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=33&hilit=favicon
Yes, those are the posts I looked at as well. I would say I see yours a lot less than 95% of the time though. I can't see yours from work at all. Maybe the problem is on my work computer because so many things are blocked...? I'll look again when I get home.
ReplyDeleteBut since you linked me that post, should I take that as you can't see mine even though I can see mine in Firefox?
I got it! I was missing a little piece off code that is apparently needed for Google chrome to see Favicons. I can now see it in Internet Explorer too. I'll have to see what I can see at work. They have us still using IE6.
ReplyDeleteNow I can have all the Favicon druid blogs open in tabs and it makes me very happy! ... I have no life...
Okay Aert. Can see it next to the url in the location spot. It's on the tab, and in my favorites. Basically looks like it's fully working in Firefox.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree the rejuv icon does seem to match the purple the best.
Only problem is the webchat stuff is blocked from my work. So I see the "warning" messages saying it's been blocked on the side bar. Everything looks great though.