Reviews welcome for my gardening blog

Bump!

I'm still waiting for a comment.

www.metro-greens.in

HI there :)Clean blog template. Wonderful content

What i would suggest is:

• Include more posts on home page. currently i was able to view only 2 which i think is less. A good reader will look for more.
• Include "random/popular posts" section at the place of "archives" shift the latter down
• You already have a "live vists" gadget that shows geographical regions. Why is the other one(cluster aps) needed then !!

And Ah yes, it does inspire to do some gardening

All the best. Keep posting

Thanks Shuffles. Thanks a lot for your review of my blog, and your precious suggestions. As for your first suggestion, I think that allowing more posts on the home page changes the number of posts in other pages as well. This increases the page load time, hence, I thought it wise to allow only two posts.

I've included Popular Posts section as you suggested.

I'm using two live visits gadgets, somewhat, for SEO. These gadgets do provide backlinks to your site.

Anyway, thanks for your suggestions.

Slider on Home Page

I know that you have put in a lot of effort to customise the slider and I appreciate it but there are some modifications that I would suggest.

• As you already know, your blog’s load time is a bit too high. While the page is being loaded, the slider has just a circle and on hovering over it, the next and previous buttons appear. It appears a bit odd that the navigation buttons appear even though there is no content at that moment.
• Another issue is that the height of the slider area while it is being loaded is not the same as its height after it loads. Imagine a user who has scrolled down to one of your posts and started reading it while the page is still being loaded. Once the slider loads, the visible part of the blog changes and the post he was reading would no longer be in that part, given the height of the slider. Though this may not happen frequently, I would suggest that you do something to deal with this - may be you can set the slider div’s height to the same as that of the photo during the page load also.
• The third issue is with your slider pushing your content below the fold. Different people may have different opinion about it but I personally feel that atleast one blog post snippet should be visible on home page without scrolling.
• The fourth issue is with the automatic resizing of the slider to match the browser’s width. This further aggravates the problem I mentioned above. And I really doubt if the entire slider would fit in the browser window on a widescreen monitor. I think the simplest and the best solution to this would be to make your blog’s template width fixed instead of fluid.

Navbar

I feel that the Blogger navbar serves no useful purposes. May be you can consider removing it.

Header

The text colour of your blog’s title and description is the same as that of the flower in the background due to which the text is almost unreadable. Use some shadow or outline for the text or as I’ve suggested above, use a fixed width template so that you can create a fixed width header image that would include the image and text. And since the width is known in advance, this problem of text colour matching the colour in the background will not occur.

Background Colour

I generally suggest people not to use a black background as it strains the eye. But yours is an exception. Even though you have used a black background, it’s isn’t straining the eye much because of using a shade of gray instead of perfect white for the foreground text. The font family and size also looks perfect.

The blue coloured background of the footer area is looking good on the black background. But, the white coloured text is unreadable. I suggest that you change it. You can also consider increasing the padding on the left for the footer area.  

Sidebar - Labels Cloud

The label cloud is too large. I feel that you have used extra labels for no reason. Most of your labels have only one post and that proves my point. 

There appears to be some issue with the label ‘82+ inch tall potted plant’. When I click on that label, I am being shown a message saying that there are no posts with that label.

May be you can pick the most important labels and manually create a label cloud. That would be more helpful to your readers than the current one you have.

Your custom analytics 

May be you can do something to hide that black bar in which you have your analytics code.  I think you will be able to do it by adding custom CSS to the div with id HTML1 with appropriate properties to make the background colour transparent.

Social Widgets

As far as my knowledge is concerned, the facebook page badge is an old one and is no longer used by many people today. Instead, consider using the like box for pages which will allow people to like your page without exiting your site.  Moreover, it also shows a list of few people who have liked your page (most of them will be friends of the person who is viewing the widget). This will increase the probability of a user liking your page.

The Google +1 button looks out of sync with the facebook and twitter widgets. While the fb and twitter widgets are for fan pages, the +1 button is for your blog URL. Add a Google+ fan page widget instead to make the user experience more consistent.  

Text Formatting

Consider adding an empty line between paragraphs. That would make text more readable. In case you are considering this suggestion, you can do away with the indentation of first line.

The font size of the captions you have used is too small. You might want to consider increasing it.

The background-foreground colour combination you used here for the quotation makes it almost unreadable.

Disabling text copying

I think you have disabled text selection fearing that plagiarists will copy your posts. But I personally, feel that that is the wrong way to prevent your blog posts from being copied. Just imagine, someone wants to google about some plant mentioned by you in your blog post. The easiest thing would be to select the text, right click and select ‘Search Google for...’ which unfortunately cannot be done on your blog. One can still type the text manually in the search box, but making things easier for your reader would be a good idea.

Blogging style

I’ve read a few of your latest posts and liked the way you have written about your own experiences instead of posting only gardening guides. It helps you connect with your readers in a better way. I also liked the pictures you have posted. But at the same time, if you are interested in getting traffic for your blog, then you should also post a few guide type articles as these are the things people generally search for on Google. 

Overall, a very good blog. 

Thanks for that honest and detailed review, Ranjith. That means a lot for anyone, even for the ones who are grandpa's and grandma's in blogging, and I'm still a kid.

Most of your points are quite valid, and for the same reason, I believe I should work on most of them, except the slider thingy, which a third party plugin, where I'll need to indulge deep in the JQuery codes to modify the behaviour of the resources (the navigation buttons and such). All other things are not much of a big issue and can be resolved in a couple of hour's work.

Maybe I'm not afraid of plagiarism, because almost all my posts are my personal experiences, so, there's a very little chance of being copied, however, the images is a different story altogether.

I'm thinking of changing the blog's template to something modern. Can you suggest some good theme, preferably green on white foreground-background and theme colours? No worries if it doesn't come with it's bells and whistles as I'll still be modifying it to my liking. Thanks in advance.

See you on your blog, tomorrow. 

Hey, CK, change the theme of ur blog.. looking really out dated and in wide screen larger displays, it looks messed up !!!