Dane Morgan launched a The Blog Improvement Zone Meme. We are supposed to discuss how we plan to improve our blogs, point to five bloggers people who those things well and then tag them.
Not knowing how terrible I am at memes, Dane tagged me. I felt guilty when I saw Andy Beard had already fulfilled his tagging assignment; now I’m finally fulfilling my obligation to tag people.
Strangely enough, I share some of Andy’s; he talks about improving his blog theme layout. Needless to say, I have the same problems and more. The main reason for my crummy template that I decided to work on pillar content first, and blog layout later. I also initially overlooked social networking (probably because I am slightly anti-social?) Andy does that very well; I’m working on that– but I already blogged about some of my efforts.
Here are blog problems I’m thinking about I want to improve in October:
- Speed up Sidebars: My content seems to load fairly nicely. To maximize traffic and revenue, I need everything above the fold to load quickly. This includes content, navigation and ads. Unfortunately, my sidebars are often pathetically slow. This was partly due to Bumpzee which frequently bogged down. Other widgets often loaded slowly: I’ve moved all suspect slugs to the footer for now until I find a better solution.
Who does this better than me? Every one
- Archives by time and topic.I generally prefer topical archives. However, some monetizing programs like Pay Per Post and some blog visitors want temporal archives. I’m going to seek out a calendar to minimize the amount of space devoted to temporal archives.
Who does this better than me? I don’t know! I think archives are just a problem.
- Not enough posts linking out. Specifically, I don’t link out to good posts I find and read often enough. Blog readers generally find out-links to valuable content a service: it helps them find solutions to problems. That’s one of the reasons “list” posts are popular.
Everyone knows who does this well: Pro-blogger, Darren Rowse, who solicited links to focus articles throughout August. He then posted articles like: 113 Must Read Blogging Tips!
- Layout needs space for more ads Sounds odd, right? But this blog is intended to talk about monetizing. Though I do not intend to focus solely on making the most money, I need space for ads in the sidebar, while still providing clear navigation. I’m also working on a plugin for affiliate ads– but I’m experiencing some mental blog issues.
Who does this well? Maurice of Cayman Host has a nice four column theme. I can navigate and find posts, I can read the post without distraction. Yet, Maurice has plenty of ads with some appearing on both above the fold and as I scroll down. I think the layout doesn’t look spammy. So, that’s a candidate.
- I need products to promote. After I create the perfect layout, I need products right? Well, I know who explains where to find them! That’s Josh Spaulding of Make Money Blog., though, the products are often on other pages he hosts.
We are supposed to tag the people who do this better than we do. I picked 5 areas for improvement and named who did this better than I. So I guess that means I’ve tagged: Maurice of Cayman Host, Josh Spaulding of Make Money Blog., Darren Rowse of Problogger, “everyone” and “I don’t know”.
Will they all pick up the baton?
Well…. I suspect “everyone” and “I don’t know” are unlikely to rise to the challenge. Darren is an awfully nice guy; he’s also probably a bit busy. With luck, Maurice and Josh will continue the meme and keep it from dying!
Hi Lucia,
Thanks for participating. For the record i think you did a great job with this meme.
For your loading problem try this. Use two lists in each side bar.
|——————–|
| Sidebar1 – Sidebar2|
| List 1 ..- List3 .-|
|………………..|
| List 2 ..- List4 .-|
|………………..|
Place the stuff you most want loaded quickly in 1
then the next stuff that you want seen, but not as important for quickly in 3. Put some stuff that loads quickly, but isn’t important for above the fold in 2 and all of the slow stuff in 4.
This should let you move things back to your sidebar, and have the above the fold stuff load more quickly letting the slower stuff load just before the footer, but not holding up other stuff in the same list, since the other stuff is in other lists.
Hey Lucia,
As far as products to promote, just let me know when you have everything set up how you like and I’ll give you some great recommendations.
This is actually the first meme I’ve taken part in. I do know Maurice and I were tagged by Vlad and we’ve already posted ours lol I will however reciprocate the link love.
I can see memes being a little complicated when it comes to who tagged who, but they seem like very good link bait and a good way to learn a thing or two as well.
I am one of those people who likes temporal archives. Sometimes I come across a blog that I like so much that I want to read it all from the beginning – this is especially the case when the blog is following some kind of story or journey.
A plugin that I have used on my blog that might help you with this is called “smart archives”, here’s the link:
http://justinblanton.com/2005/03/smart-archives-v101
@Dane,
I think I don’t understand some nuance, because I did put the slower stuff to the bottom.
There is something about the way the CSS is in my sidebar that keeps the whole sidebar from loading while it waits for the slow stuff to appear.
I’m sure I could somehow fix this with CSS, but I’m not sure how. (My CSS skills are poor.)
My knitting blog is better. On that blog, I load a wide “about me” box at the top of the sidebar that load quickly. Then, I load the lower sidebar, and if it’s slow, I don’t care. I’m thinking of fiddling with stuff along those lines.
That’s exactly what I was getting at Lucia. It’s the containers. If you have the entire sidebar, top to bottom in a single list some browsers will load the entire container (list) before displaying it. By breaking it up into several separate lists (or divs) each will render before the next processes.
This is why the upper “about me” on the knitting blog loads without waiting. It isn’t in the same container as the rest of the sidebar.
Oh, yes, and limping over the line in a very distant last place, just ahead of “everyone” and “I don’t know” comes a rather embarrassed island slacker……yes, I only just realized I’d been tagged by Lucia as well as Vlad.
Humble apologies and belated thanks for the tag Lucia, which, I shall hurriedly include in my own post as soon as I’m done here.
I don’t find your site particularly slow loading but even if I did, I’m too much of a tech dumb**s to be able to suggest an improvement – it’s lucky we have guys like Dane
As for archives, on the blog, my theme provided a link at the top of my page leading to an archive by month. I doubt it’s much use and I think the drop down category menu in the sidebar is a lot more useful. Overall, I find your blog nice and easy to navigate
The theme is instantly recognizable as ‘yours’, and if I were to suggest any changes it would be to have a spring clean of the footer – the spam stuff at the bottom could go without losing anything from a reader perspective. I think if Dean’s advice works, your Bumpzee and BlogRush stuff would do you far more good in one of your sidebars, even well below the fold. (I’ll add my usual qualifier – what the heck do I know though!)
Thanks for mentioning the four column layout on my directory. I chose it because the site is not realy a “regular blog” and it was an attempt to use WP more as a CMS and WPDesigner’s theme seemed ideal for what I had in mind. Still needs a lot of work.
Thanks again for the tag…..I got there in the end!
Maurice
“Not enough posts linking out.”
Google doesnt like if you have too many outbound links.
@dog tags: what you say is partly true. Google doesn’t like link farms, humongonourmouse blog rolls or other things. But they often rank pages with loads of related quality outbound links very highly.
Their algorithm is fairly complex, but mostly, you want inbound links. As a blogger, you will get more inbound links if you read other blogs, and have blog conversations with other bloggers. The reason why is they will link back in the natural course of conversation.
also ive notice that google doesnt show all your backlinks thru link:htt://www.site.com. its hard to get backlinks especially if your site is new and as you’ve mentioned if you dont participate w/ other blogs, you wont get any link juice.
@dog tags– that’s just what I mean. Outbound links have many functions. One is engaging other bloggers in conversations which happens to also bring in links.
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