Improve Your Blog Month-Week 2 Review

I’m sure you folks have noticed a few minor changes on my blog this far in honor of “Improve Your Blog Month”! I’ve followed my own suggestion of changing up my template, and cleaning up my sidebars.

I started out with my regular color scheme and format, then I decided to add a pattern to the background.

Hmmm, that was a bit loud, and there were comments about “baby poo brown”, so I tried a few other patterns

And settled on this one for now:

What do you think of the current background? Too loud and distracting? I’m not really sure I’m jazzed with it. I’ll eventually need to change my color scheme to go better with whatever background I choose, but I’ll wait on that a bit.

The next thing I did was a bit of a clear out on my sidebars. This is still a continuing process. I reduced the full Frugal Hacks blogroll down to the badge version. I’m contemplating changing most of my lists over to those ones that you have to click to expand. . . I just think it will clean it up a bit and let folks who aren’t scrolling down all the way know what other information there is.

I did run into a snag cleaning up my footer. I had a bunch of badges down there for various indexes and such that I had signed up for when I first started blogging to let folks know I existed. To be honest, I never really saw any inbound traffic from any of them-so I decided to remove them.

Somehow when I did that everything that was left centered itself (which I don’t want) and all the code below that of sitemeter isn’t showing. Rather, it is showing in the edit mode but totally doesn’t show on the blog. I’ve got two things that should be showing-the blogging chicks blogroll icon and the Topsites icon. Since my knowledge of HTML is very minimal I have no clue what to do.

I checked to make sure I wasn’t missing any “>” symbols or anything obvious like that, but otherwise I’m clueless. If there is anyone out there who is willing to look at my code and help me out, please comment or contact me!

Now it’s time for everyone else out there in bloggy land to let us know what you’ve been up to improvement wise. All you have to do is sign in to the Mr. Linky below with a link to your post that details the changes you’ve made, and we’ll all come on over and check out your progress.

Remember-the link should be to the specific article, not just to your main blog page. If you link to your main page after a few days we might not be able to see your post or understand what changes you’ve made. Screen shots are always nice too.