Since I’m the one hosting this whole shebang, I figure that I should get off my keister and do my own wrap up! (I also hustled my cyber-butt over to Photobucket and hosted my profile picture finally so that I could link to it. Geez-ya’d think I was the mother of two young children or something)
So I started off the month of April looking like this:
Middle
Bottom
Admittedly, a very nice template. In some ways a much nicer looking template than what I have now. However, as I pointed out to my mom-who doesn’t wander around the blogosphere very much-to anyone who reads blogs much at all it is GLARINGLY OBVIOUS that it is one of the standard templates that Blogger offers, and therefore made me look like an unprofessional newbie (well, unprofessional I may be, but after a year I wanted to look a little less newbie-ish. Uh, is that a word?)
Since I have lots of extra “stuff” that I wanted to have in my sidebars, and I am highly suspicious that most folks just read the newest post or so and never scroll down, I really wanted to move to a 3 column template. So I searched high and low and found several 3 column templates. I went through this, which was just too cold and clinical looking for me:
Then this, which reminded me of a ketchup and mustard color scheme. Ick:
and settled on this template where I could change the colors of the side boxes, and this color scheme, which I might just change in the future but am happy enough with for now:
Next I reorganized my sidebars. This mostly consisted of deciding which items I really wanted to show up “above the fold” (ie on the first screen without scrolling down), adding a feedburner feed and counter (I’m still not sure about that-does it make me look dorky to have so few subscribers right now? Personally I kind of get a kick out of watching it grow) and moving my Lunchbox Report to the sidebar where the folks who aren’t interested in it can ignore it if they want! Part of that was to update the Lunchbox Report by writing a post on portion sizes and then placing a link to it in the bottom of the lunchbox report. I also realized as I was writing this that I never did put the link in for the “packing of a lunch” post that I did—wait just a minute. . . . . .OK, fixed it.
I did some other minor reorganizing, and am considering dropping the Library Bag. To be quite honest, I don’t update it as often as I should-I read a ton more than what I update, and I’m not sure if anyone even looks at it. I only put it there because I’m an avid reader and nosey to boot-I personally like to see what other folks are reading.
Then life got busy and I pretty much dropped the ball. My intent was to do a “New Readers Start Here” or “Welcome” or “FAQ” page. Someplace that someone new hitting the blog could go to sort of brush up on the highlights. Life (a blessing of the bikes, business trip for Yankee Bill and a wine tasting) all sort of overcame me and that never happened. Neither did doing a “Blogger’s Choice” Project.
So there you have it, the improvements to my own blog.
Next Monday I will post a poll with all the blogs I know about who have done improvements, and we can all spend the week checking them out and voting on who we think is the most improved!
Reading this post made me realize that I rarely link to your blog, but read it in the RSS feed. So, you might want to check out on blogger if you can just post a snippet of the post in the feed. That would encourage people like me (lazy, don’t like too many mouse clicks) to actually come to the blog, rather than just read from the feed.
Just a thought.
Lisa-I’m sure there is a way to do that, but there are a lot of folks that find that annoying. To be honest I personally find it annoying when I’m reading other people’s blogs in my reader. So I figure it would be hypocritical for me to do it š
And since I don’t have any advertising or anything that I am trying to dryive anyone to see, it really doesn’t matter THAT much if folks take the time to see the actual site or just read the content. As long as they read, I’m happy.
Jenn,
Yours looks so great. I’m so sorry; I totally bailed on you on this whole “improve your blog” thing. I really need to learn html. Until I do that, I’m kinda stuck, cause I don’t really wanna pay someone else money to do a redesign. Thanks so much for doing this. Sorry I didn’t end up following up with that. š
Jess @ Making Home
I think that dropping the library bag is a good idea. You can recusitate it later, but for now, you’re busy with other stuff.
Love you!
Well, Jenn, you may not have gotten around to doing everything you planned, but you did an excellent job with your wrap-up. š
Hello…
I’ve been following your “improve your blog” posts and I think you did a fantastic job! You mentioned you chose this template because it allowed you to change the colors. Which template was that because when I went to the sites you posted, I didn’t see any that could be changed.
Thanks for inspiring me!!