Week Two of "Improve your Blog Month"–

Welcome to Week 2 of “Improve Your Blog Month”~

If you want to see what the big idea is either click on the coffee mug to the right, or go to the post with the initial idea: “I’m Declaring April Amateur Improve Your Blog Month”.

Then hop on over to “Improve your Blog Month Starts Here” and sign in to Mr. Linky at the bottom to join the fun. (don’t forget to take a couple of screen shots-see how in the improve your blog month post)

Last week I encouraged everyone to mess around with their blog templates. I even gave a ton of places to go to for free templates in a few different platforms, and a couple of cool color tools to help you pick your color scheme.

As for me, I started out with the standard blogger template-

Went to a 3 column style-
tried a few color combinations (not all of which were captured with screen shots)-

Switched to another template where I could color the boxes in separately, and here is where I am today.
I don’t by any means think I’m finished! But on to other factors as I continue (probably for the rest of my life) to tweak! At least I’ve got something more interesting than I started out with.

This week I’m going to be working on “Reorganizing Sidebars”. (week 3 will be “create a FAQ page” and week 4 “Bloggers Choice”.)

I’ve already done a bit of work on my sidebar. The first thing I hope to do is add a profile photo, and a more prominent way to email me-perhaps with an email icon rather than a written link to help confound those darn spammers.

The 3 column layout has helped to get more of the “extra” information that I wanted folks to see (at least the folks who are actually visiting and not just feed-reading) up close to the top.

I also tried to arrange things in an order so the things I wanted most prominent will be “above the fold“–ie in the first screen so folks don’t have to scroll down.

For example, I wanted to make sure that the buttons for the feed readers were prominent so folks knew they existed, I also didn’t want folks to have to scroll around looking for my profile info. The fact that I am listed on About.com and on the Top 10 Sources is very good PR, as is the fact that Making Home awarded me a badge-it would be really Dumb to hide those things down on the bottom where someone might not see them!

Some items, like the lunchbox report are interesting to some folks, and might cause them to come back, so I wanted at least the title to show on the first page-if someone new might catch sight of that and scroll down to see what exactly it is. (I am assuming that once I get a profile photo up only the title will show on the first page.

On the other hand, most folks who read blogs will realize that there probably an archive, blogroll, and label list somewhere–I wasn’t really concerned with those three items taking up “Prime Real Estate”. Folks who know about and want to use them will look for them. Folks who don’t know to look for them probably won’t click on them.

So those are some of the sorts of things I will be thinking about and fiddling with this week, as well as trying to come up with a better font and some sort of graphic for my title bar. And to be quite honest I’d prefer rounded boxes-this still looks too sharp for me, I’d rather something a little more organic. . . .

Maybe I should just go back to a green color scheme. . . .