Blog critique

shifty_uk

shifty_uk

shifty_uk

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Joined
27 Sep 2004
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Still editing away with wordpress but I get the feeling my blog is rather boring/mundane.

Despite wanting the content to speak for itself generally, how do you reckon it feels layout wise?

Average time spent on the blog is ridiculously low, maybe the content needs more substance? Could always give away freebies, that's always a winner for driving traffic :p Tutorials etc...

Blog here
 
I think it's bland at the top. Obviously if there was more content it would be easy to make some menus and split everything up, so you could put that along the top.

Tutorials will certainly add a lot of content, maybe add pics showing the development and progression of drawings as you go along? So then you could add some menus at the top linking to the different content. Plus it's a pain scrolling allll the way down. :p

Add a contact form - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/ instead of just having your email address.

Add a more in depth 'about me' section? Say a bit more about your drawings, your life, uni, work etc?


Is the logo banner background colour meant to be a different colour to the background of the pages? If I was you I would change the font of the headings to the same font that your name is, in the banner.
 
Cheers for the tips Azza :) Firstly this header image is doing my head in! Ahhh! Whatever file format I save it as, jpeg, png, gif, it never shows up the same colour as the background despite the code being exactly the same. So, last night I took a screenshot of the colour difference in Safari and used that code instead. Now, it looks fine in Safari but doesn't work properly in Firefox! :mad:

Any fixes? :p

As for menus, I did have them at the top but I thought they overcrowded it slightly but I guess you're right, more depth and layering is definitely needed!

edit: The font on the banner is not a standard font so I'd have to embed somehow in order to have the post headings etc the same.
 
Last edited:
I think i've got the header image fixed if someone could test it on their PC?

Only issue now is making the header image a link which leads back to the index page without causing any issues with the existing php :p
 
shifty_uk said:
I think i've got the header image fixed if someone could test it on their PC?

Only issue now is making the header image a link which leads back to the index page without causing any issues with the existing php :p
Click to expand...


Colour looks fine to me now in Chrome on my monitor. :)

Issues?
 
Apparently the browsers render file formats differently so I tried using the save for web function in PS and wala, worked :)

Cheers for the contact form link, sticking it in now :)
 
Any further suggestions from anyone on what kind of things would be interesting to see on the site? That sidebar is looking horrifically bare, I'm not much of a social network goer otherwise I would've linked all my fancy profiles and so on down there. Not sure what else to put.
 
Great artwork. One thing I noticed is that on some of your artwork you're able to click which shows the picture in its own window but doesn't actually show a larger version.

Adding something like lightbox and a nice large version to see the details more clearly would be good as most of it is quite small currently.
 
sidebar - links to latest comment, links away from blog (careful, take traffic away!) calendar of posts, rss feed link....

Plenty of things that can go there....
 
Mint_Sauce said:
Great artwork. One thing I noticed is that on some of your artwork you're able to click which shows the picture in its own window but doesn't actually show a larger version.

Adding something like lightbox and a nice large version to see the details more clearly would be good as most of it is quite small currently.
Click to expand...

Cheers man, just added a lightbox feature to the posts.

The reason the artwork is generally so small is because they're sketches. When I'm sketching I start off with a low res canvas, usually around 1.5k pixels, which means my machine and large brush strokes run effortlessly.

After the foundations are laid I up the res to 3-4k and detail from there. The paintings on the site are still at the low res sketch phase meaning they dont look as dandy when their 100% :p I'll keep it in mind, though and include bigger images :)

3dcandy said:
sidebar - links to latest comment, links away from blog (careful, take traffic away!) calendar of posts, rss feed link....

Plenty of things that can go there....
Click to expand...
Hmm, don't want to drive traffic away like you said. To this day I haven't got a clue how or what RSS actually is nor do I know anyone who uses 'feeds'. I'll have a think :)
 
really great artwork, would be great if the full size images where bigger though, some are actually smaller than the thumb in the blog post.
 
Wondering if anyone could help me. Didn't feel the need to start a new thread.

I'm trying to centre align my menu so that it's essentially positioned right under the header image.

Here's the list code if it helps:
Code: 
#nav ul {
	list-style-type: none;
}

#nav li {
	margin-right: 25px;
	font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Verdana, sans-serif;
	font-size: 0.5em;
	line-height: 1.6;
	float: left;
}

I'm really not sure how to go about this. Whenever I change the positioning attributes it either edits the position of the entire header image and margins of the page or it makes the menu titles pile up on top of each other making the padding useless.

Any ideas? :)
 
On the #nav ul put "margin: 0 auto;"

The site does look pretty bare. Any way of increasing the content? Also, the font size is ridiculously small. Can barely see the about or contact link at the top.
 
Thanks for the help :)

You're right. I like a minimal site but it seems far too bare. Unfortunately I'm not particularly into all of these fancy social networking sites so I don't have much to quote or link to. I'm all out of ideas. There's not enough content to make calendars or search functions or even RSS viable.
 
I disagree with the rss feed, there's plenty of content to populate the feed, and it's easy to find out the feed address. If people like your site and subscribe to the feed, once a new post is up, they will be notified about it, and can take a visit. Facebook also is a huge traffic provider these days, if you have a facebook account, create a page and then send people to your site....
How does the site rank in google? Have you installed any seo plugins to help your google ranks? What are your keywords? I bet I could increase your traffic loads if you want a hand...in fact I'll guarantee I can boost your traffic without doing anything dodgy...
 
Just to add I'd also put in a captcha or something along those lines on your contact form. There are a few that work with contact form 7 (if you use that) because if and when you get traffic, the spam will also follow...

If you want some friendly help and advice, ping us an email on ade[at]3dcandy[dot]co[dot]uk
 
and just another quick one...you only have 2 pages at the top, none of which link back to your work, meaning if you click on a page, you then need to use the back button to go back and see the posts...why not create a posts page which has the posts in, it's pretty simple. Also, more pages can increase your google visibility if done properly, you could perhaps organise the artwork into a couple of pages for example...

The image map for the header isn't all along the title you see, so it's not obvious that clicking that will lead back to the posts, and seeing as only half actually does link...
 
Thanks for you advice Ade, it's greatly appreciated :) I've ran a couple of SEO report websites over the blog and you're completely right, it sucks. The rankings are pretty awful, especially when comparing them against 'competing sites'.

I'm using all in one SEO pack which handles the meta data, keywords etc but to be honest I don't quite understand the ins and outs of SEO terminology so it's not something I've considered. I simply assumed masses of content worded in the correct fashion coupled with traffic coming from referral sites(I have a total of 3) would be the way to boost search engine rankings and increase traffic. Shows my naivety.
 
Took a while to load and there's no "home" button to get back once you've clicked on about or contact. Also on the home page you have that bit to the right "about this blog" yet have an about tab.
 
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