100,000+ views! I am so happy that my blog's reached another milestone. I think that owns, personally, and hope I can keep churning out posts for everyone that are both fun and informative, and you keep coming back to visit.There are a lot of changes in the works for 4 Haelz. I'm learning GIMP bit by bit, and am coming up with a lot of fun pictures and designs. Of course, all of this has to be done while still giving me time to do my homework, go to classes, sleep, and, you know, actually play WoW! Add into it that Sharlet (who has since quit playing WoW) is teaching me how to play DotA on WCIII, and my hands are full. Plus, I believe I'm still supposed to eat?
I've contemplated redoing my blogroll. I like how it looks; unfortunately, it is really difficult to keep updated. A lot of those little squares lead to blogs that no longer update or have disappeared entirely, and adding blogs takes time I do not always have. It is a little frustrating; I love the design but the upkeep is just a little overwhelming. And it occurs to me that perhaps it does not help people find any sort of blog at all. Not all of the pictures are clear about what is contained in the blog it leads to.
That being said, I do not know if I want to go to the Blogger blog roll that updates and displays based on who posts. While the advantage of that is that I can add as many blogs as I want and never worry about deleting the ones who never post and can conserve space at the same time, it does not allow for a static list, in case people are looking for a certain type of blog. Say, for instance, Bear hasn't updated with something "feral" in the title, but someone is looking for a tanking bear post. They may not know to go to his site.
I am also not completely satisfied with my layout; I want more space to organize information, but I am a little bit fail without a template, and I am horrendously picky when it comes to what I want. If I had the time I would learn how to make my own, but until the summer (and perhaps not even then), time is something I don't really have.
I also want to add some sort of increased functionality to my blog. There are plenty of ways to relay information. I feel I have the typing down; perhaps it is time to expand my repertoire? I'm not quite sure which skills I have that could do so, but I'm brainstorming, so we'll see where it goes.
3 comments:
Grats on so many views! I really know what you mean about blogger's layouts - they just don't offer anything sleek, do they? That's why I'm happy I moved to wordpress - they offer nice looking layouts for those of us that aren't codingly gifted.
And I had issues with the blogroll thing too, really. I was happy with the convenience of the blogger updated one, and moving to wordpress I didn't get the "ease" of it, but I must say that your picture-blogroll is very creative and pleasing to the eye and gives a different "first impression" of the blogs than just links (which I so boringly employ!) While I can totally see how upkeep of it would be a timesink, it gives your blog an extra punch of creative & awesome :)
:] Gogo 4Haelz!
1 - Grats on the views!
2 - Grats on hitting the most important thing in being a good webhost... trying to look at your site's functionality from your *visitor's* point of view.
A sidebar is a balance of trying to get more visual "prettiness" on the page (as compared to all of the text) along with trying to give your visitors more information or functionality.
Right now your blogroll looks more like a Myspace friends list than a blogroll; and you're right - as a visitor it really gives me no idea as to what type of blog I'll be visiting if I click through. The alternate text that pops up on hover does help a bit.
Taking out the images and linking just with text would provide more immediate information (rather than waiting on alt text to pop up), and it would allow you to break the list up into more categories without having visually-uneven blocks of images.
To balance out the sidebar a bit more, you could always add in some more images every so often, or even have a larger header image for each block (instead of the small arrows) to break things up.
Linking with text would provide the blogs you link to some "link love", as well.
Post a Comment