In my mind, the best way to get your creative juices flowing is a redesign. Obviously the visuals are a big part of this, but take a look at your code. I recommend starting clean. Take some time to decide how you eventually want your blog to handle. Will you be posting images? Do you want advertising? Will your markup be SEO friendly? Try to begin to establish your image.
If you are just starting out, make sure you are crosschecking your code in multiple browsers often. One of the hardest things to do after seeing your mangled design in IE6, or 7 for that matter, is narrow down the problem.
If design isn’t your bag and you are using a pre-made template, find a way to make it your own. An hour to learn a bit of CSS won’t kill you, and a few tweaks here and there will set you apart from the rest. But don’t butcher it. There are days when I wonder why some of the top themes are so popular, and then I remember Myspace.
A great tool to assist you in working on your new design is to take a look at your pool of topics. Are you going for a specific niche? Add some elements that allow users to immediately identify with it. Perhaps your blog is more personal and covers a variety of topics. Drop a few subtle hints, but don’t scare people away with “Fluffles the Cat says:” as the first subsection in your sidebar. The main idea here is to decide on a good set of topics. There’s nothing wrong with the occasional sidebar. In fact it adds more personality to your blog and allows your readers to see who you really are.
For most of you, blogging started with reading blogs. If your blog has died off, maybe it’s time to start getting involved in other’s efforts again in an attempt to reignite your initial passion. At the end of the day, blogging is about conversation, or at least the prospect of conversation. Make sure your comments are relevant. This means no “Hey that’s cool, I write stuff too at ….” People will follow your name if they like what you have to say.
For some reason this technique is a mystery to most bloggers, as it was to me when I started my first blog. The ability to write ahead of time seems bizarre when people think of the Internet as an impulse platform, but this can be a great way to get ahead and avoid the pressure of constant updates.
In the same vein, make sure you dedicate time to blog, or give yourself a reasonable quota that you would like to meet. Don’t overestimate your ambition, but don’t underestimate it either. It’s all about finding aconsistency that fits you and your topic.
Perform an autopsy on the fallen blog. Find out what killed it and find out what worked. Bring back some articles that worked, and ditch the ones that didn’t. Better yet, fix the ones that didn’t and make them into something useful.
]]>The first two seconds of a page load should speak novels about the quality of your work. A design doesn’t need to be an artistic masterpiece, but it needs to either be noticed for it’s beauty or not noticed at all. It’s better to be unphased after the initial impression than to immediately feel like you have been somehow deported to someone’s mid-90’s Geocities masterpiece.
Disregarding the normal glitz and glamor approach found on many designer blogs, the easiest thing to do is re-align. A popular topic that comes up every now and then, re-aligning basically comes down to making sure everything fits into nice, level chunks. If you must, there’s quite a bit of buzz about grid layouts that you can look into. Frankly I always assumed it was an implied technique, but apparently everyone is touting it as a new era of design.
Another factor that deters readers interest is typography. Often overlooked, but easily noticeably when bad, the wrong combination of typefaces and sizes can really hurt a blog. Everyone talks about crafting great headlines, which is important, but making sure these titles you’ve pined over are readable is just as important. For finding the right typefaces I highly recommend Typetester. Aside from allowing you to preview various setups side by side, Typetester also gives you the option of copying the CSS for quick implementation.
Color schemes. What’s a post on design without mention of color theory. I’ll spare you the details, suffice to say that some things just don’t go together. Yellow on white? Next. There are quite a few tools out there, but currently my heart belongs to Adobe’s Kuler. Be warned though, not everything looks the same on a small font as it does in a large box so be sure to test things out. I recommend trying to find color codes that are easy to remember, but that isn’t always necessary.
]]>Perhaps the name “Archive” implies a sense of date-specific organization, and perhaps the chronological nature of blogs lends nicely to this range of thought, but is anyone actually browsing by date?
The short answer is no. While date is important for relevance purposes, the vast majority of readers that browse your blog will be looking at topics. So why is it that most blogs feature archive pages that contain only, or lead off with, date-based navigation?
We aren’t browsing old newspapers imprinted on film, so don’t treat your readers that way. Give them the good stuff right off the bat. Prioritize your page just like you do your content. Put popular content and featured content at the top. If anything on your archive page has a description, it should be this stuff. Draw their attention to the most useful items.
There’s a reason fast food joints have combos with numbers and pictures of plastic food, aside from making you ignore the cheap stuff. Readers are lazy. Accept it now and save yourself some trouble. We won’t be scrolling down 10 screens to find anything. We also won’t click a half dozen links to find something either. Give us the key items above the fold, and if possible, put images or creative type with your main articles/categories.
With all that’s been said, readers will from time to time want to gingerly stumble through your pages. Because of this, don’t completely ignore the aspect of date-based archive content. Put it somewhere, but don’t use it to fill up the page.
Be sure to check back for more tips for crafting better Archive pages.
]]>With Wordpress 2.3 on the horizon and the inclusion of built-in tagging, what better time to take a look at simplifying the process meant to simplify things.
Tag clouds are the ever popular collection of weighted links associated with different keywords used to describe content on a blog. This display of folksonomy is a nice use of anarchy in an otherwise clean-cut categorical system. The problem arises when an author gets carried away, but there are little things that can be done to prevent this.
As you begin tagging content, or go back re-tagging content, decide on a few guidelines to help along the way. Ask yourself the following questions:
There are countless tagging tools available and plenty of services take advantage of tags. Remember to think about these questions and help your cloud lose a few pounds this summer, or at least turn that weight into muscle.
]]>Despite constant assurance that the mortality rate of the Xbox 360 was within the norm of consumer electronics, I witnessed the death of a mere infant. Eight pounds, five months of age. With dreams of adventure, high scores, head-shots, and excessive prices for lackluster content, my Xbox 360 died on June 2nd, 2007. We were enjoying season two of The Office on DVD when suddenly it stopped. Everything stopped.
I pressed the center ring, assuming it was merely a hiccup. It twitched, and began flashing red. The stories stories I had read were true. A healthy system with a birth defect had joined the thousands of it’s brothers and sisters in a fate predetermined for them. An early death.
The call was made, and a coffin was shipped…So I was told. A week had passed with no news from McAllen or Redmond. I called again and was given a tracking number for a major international carrier. In a process that I was originally told would take three to five days, my coffin had taken six before it even shipped out.
Ten days A.D. I received the coffin. An unmarked container with no signs of it’s purpose. The carrier knew all the well what it’s purpose was, he had seen many before. After the unplugging andde-disking ceremony I prepared my ‘360 for it’s voyage back to the motherland…well the annex responsible for cleaning up messes of the motherland. Thursday June 14th I shipped it off. It was received four days later.
Three days shy of a month after death, I received a replacement. Not my old fixed unit, but rather someone’s system that who knows what they did to. In fact it’s born on date is older than mine was.
There is obviously an issue with production and replacement. On top of that all refurbished units are only granted a 90 day warranty as apposed to the one year that comes with new consoles. With stories of gamers on their 10th or 12th console, I can only wonder how Microsoft expects people to come back in the next generation. With current money invested, people will stay with what’s familiar, but five years from now I highly doubt any success after consistent failure from the production team. Without some major effort to make amends, I’m sure a migration of gamers will occur upon the end of our current generation.
Since the writing of this article, Microsoft has since changed their warranty policy for consoles suffering from the 3 red rings. It now covers 3 years as apposed to the previous 1 year, and is retroactive. While this is a step in the right direction, the problem still lies in quality assurance as many owners continue to suffer from broken “fixed” consoles. We shall see how this issue progresses.
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