would love your feed back on my blog
Rhymes, Musings, Anecdotes, Humour
Dear 'Wiseguy from the East',
Namaste.
I have now spend a good 45 minutes on your blog. Here's what I think of it. At the outset though, before we go into details, I would like to tell yout that I like your writing and your content is good. The soul, thus, is at the right place. The design, editing and other such stuff, however, is where my focus shall be because that is something, I guess, you should mostly work on.
Here goes:
- All your headings, text and formatting are left-aligned. Is there any reason for that? Even the title of your blog is on the left side. You can easily make it center utilizing space on both side. As of now you aren't using the white spaces as well as you can. Plus justified text looks better on blog. Even your images are just jumbled up and put together on the left side. You can easily make it appear neater.
- All your sidebar margins fade when the mouse isn't over them. It makes it a bit tedious to look at and figure out what they are saying. Also, faded green and off white may not be a good colour scheme.
- Your popular posts widget doesn't say they are popular like your Fresh! one does. Make the change.
- The 'Project 365' image on the right doesn't have any link to go to. The reader doesn't get to know what 'Project 365' is.
- Your hits counter do you a disservice. In blogging terms a hit is different from a pageview. I think your blog shows pageview as a hit. I refreshed it many times to check. It also isn't real time. Plus the reader isn't aware whether these hits are over a month or overall. It appears as if it's overall but given that you have earlier mentioned that you have had 5000+ visitors by mid last year itself, I doubt it would be the case. If you are having such a counter, make sure it doesn't undersell you which it does right now. Hits attract more hits.
- Given that your blog is a single author blog, I don't think your posts should begin with your username as if it's a multi author blog. If you go straight to the post, it'll be more appealing. Also will save space which is occupied by your image and username twice.
- Some of your posts are in full, while others say 'x' number of words are remaining and you can see it in the original. Either have a snippet system or have full posts. Not both. It generally makes the reader skip over the snippets posts.
- I am not sure what functionality the calender serves. Either have an archive if you wish to show your number of posts. Or have categories neatly lined.
- Finally, why do you have infinite scroll? Given that your blog is text heavy and it's a creative endeavour, have a minimal design which focuses on displaying your talent and writing skills more. Have it aligned page wise. Your blog will fit in round about 10-15 pages if you have written over 100 posts. Which can help push the reader to read through all of your posts. With infinite scroll, however, one doesn't know where does it all begin. Less incentive to read through.
That's about it. Again, I like your writing. Some of the posts are quite good. However, at present your blog works because of your writing skills inspite of the design. Make the blog enable and showcase your writing as it should.
Sorry for taking in the luxury to suggest a lot of changes. Hope you find them worthwhile. Thank you
Zero
Thanx a ton zero. I have been told about my poor formatting earlier but never with such helpfull suggestions. Problem is that I am tech challenged. Will try to iron out some kinks with help from smarter friends. Once again, I really appreciate the time and effort you have given me. Lets hope I can improve
Pleasure. Most of the changes won't take too much of tech knowledge. But it will majorly help.
Oh, and another thing - the editing. There are many mistakes of full stops, commas and spellings.