Ways to improve…my blog
If you’ve been reading Martyholman.com for very long (more than 3 weeks lets say), you know that I have recently changed the theme of my blog to this cool gray/white layout with disturbing bright red picture. I like it. I’ve received some good feedback as well. Along with the blog change I’ve tried to make some changes on the widgets as well to best utilize my space for those who read the site. One of the reasons for this was because I had my site graded here, and it didn’t do very well initially. My old address did, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason it did well is because it’s a WordPress domain name, and let’s just say that Martyholman.com, though it has promise, is not quite as dressed up as it should be, internally and otherwise.
So I’m looking for some advice from bloggers and computer type people (this means you Eric) who will share what I might be able to do to improve the blog.
Also, I need help dressing all my link colors in red. I have no clue how to do this, and it appears that my link colors (the colors the words become when I link them to a site) do both red and black. But you can’t always tell when the color is black because it’s only slightly more bold than before. So I need all the links in red.
Any advice anyone could give me would be appreciated.
Related posts:
I’m more of a substance-over-form type of a guy, Marty, so I’m primarily concerned with content. And thusfar I think you have had a great mix of content… not just strictly church-related stuff, which can get stuffy after a while. But you’ve had some really interesting topics for discussion… you need to give a kick in the butt to your churchgoers to participate more. This thing is INTERACTIVE. That means people get to INTERACT with you and with each other. To me, that’s a huge attraction to the whole blog format. And you’re attentive to your blog… you don’t just throw something out there and let it ride for 3 weeks, ignore the people who comment, and then post something else a few weeks later. (A BIT OF EDITING here)
(A BIT MORE EDITING) But somehow I don’t think we’ll be seeing that here, so I personally would be cautious about making major changes. Not that it cannot be improved, but to me the content and the interesting discussions are a tremendous attraction, and in that regard, I would be careful about making any big changes.
Thanks for the thoughts UR. I did edit a bit two parts for two different reasons. I appreciate your suggestions though and your kind words about the blog. Thanks.
The most important thing I can say here is that that site, websitegrader, it’s aimed at evaluating how well your site will be as a marketing tool. It’s SEO for moneymaking sites, not for personal blogs.
Your links are red until they’ve been visited, then they become black. You’re probably more used to seeing blue links turn purple, but your theme styles this as red->black. You can change this if you want, but you’ll have to learn how to read a little CSS, and go to WordPress’s theme editor to do it. If you don’t know CSS, I definitely recommend at least learning how to read it well enough to know what style to look for and change. It should look like “a:visited {color: black;}” or “a:visited {color: #000;}”, and you want to change that color value from “#000″ or “black” to whatever color value is given for most of your links (which you can find as like “a {color: #883322;}”).
If that was just totally confusing, check out a tutorial here:
http://htmlhelp.com/reference/css/quick-tutorial.html
And a reference here:
http://xhtml.com/en/css/reference/
I’ll post another comment with a less technical response.
So, I don’t think that websitegrader SEO stuff is that important, and WordPress is doing the basics for you already. The only real improvements I’d suggest for your blog are some design ones, and that’s subjective. But if you wanted to, I could suggest a few things.
Hey, I’m now a “visioneer”! Thanks Marty!
Glad to see you’re reading the comments, Marty. Every once in a while I’ll toss you a bone like that to keep you on your toes!
Now I totally want to know what UR said that you deleted…
and I want to say this: why are you blogging? If you are blogging for YOU, for your church, for God, then what does it matter what “score” you got on a webreview? If you are blogging about yourself, your church, and God for ATTENTION, then yeah, you could change up a thing or two… you know?
Thanks for keeping me on my toes UR.
Eric, thanks so much for the advice. I’ll be trying to catch up on some cssing in the near future. Probably be a good thing to know, and yes, you are a visioneer. Keep it up man! And continue to feel free to give me a heads up on whats happening in the future so I can keep up a bit too.
Jane, hmmm, what to say. I can’t really tell you what UR said, though I can tell you he’s a colorful guy (probably a bit of an underexaggeration [sp?])
And I’m not so sure that its so cut and dry as the way you proposed motive and such. So because I want to have a clean home and maybe be better organized at my work or because I want to improve my messages each Sunday (I’m a pastor), then I don’t have to change a thing? Not sure I follow the logic. We should always be willing to improve, right?
The score thing is simply a tool to help me improve the blog. Improving isn’t bad, in fact, I think I could make a case that not improving is bad for one’s self, one’s circumstances, and one’s God.