I have a request for all you savvy blog readers out there. Please tell me what you love, or hate, about my blog. I’m all ears. Be as critical as you want.
Some things that I’m still working on at present:
Theme. Hopefully this new theme will bug me less than the old one. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great theme — but it had some things about it that didn’t seem professional to me. For example, it put the H2 tag in lowercase instead of titlecase. Also, the blue-purple color really didn’t seem good to me, so I replaced it with black.
Content. My lack of focus on a particular niche has made the content less focused than it should probably be. I am still experimenting here, and probably will be for a long time.
Schedule. I didn’t post til noon yesterday, even though I’ve been cranking out two to three per day for a while. (This is an experiment as well.) If I had done the responsible thing, I could have had posts placed in a buffer and it would have posted at 8:00am like today.
Self-focus. I still tend to focus a lot on myself in my articles, even though I know it can be boring to others. Even this article has a huge amount of self-focus! It’s a means of curing writer’s block apparently; it’s always possible to talk about yourself for hours on end even when you have nothing to say.
I’ve been trying to cure this by editing out some of the self-references (occurrences of “me” and “I”). Hopefully this doesn’t lose the naturalness of style — experimental stuff here. 
Things I am liking so far:
Daily updates. I haven’t been a total loss as far as scheduling goes — every day for the past 4 weeks I have had at least one post. Even if that came late in the afternoon, at least it got done every single day.
New friends. Since I have been commenting lots on other blogs, I have had lots of people stop by to say hi. This is a very fun and addicting sensation.
Good articles. I have published several articles that were actually pretty decent, and got lots of comments. I was also able to experiment around a bit and try things that maybe weren’t the best idea at the time.
If you have anything to add regarding what you like or don’t like, please drop a comment.. Let me know what sucks and what rocks. Throw rotten tomatoes or wreaths, whichever you think I’ve earned. Thanks for participating!
Related posts:
April 2nd, 2008 at 4:14 pm - Edit
Luke…you have a lot of good things to say in your blog; however, I can see that a lot of people would get confused when visiting. What I mean is everything is all together; there’s nothing separating content, sidebar, etc. There’s just a lot to sort through.
Another thing I notice is that you have a lot of posts on the front page, but they don’t have much to guide the user into reading more. I’m no expert, but what I try to do is give a quick paragraph about the post that leads into the rest of the post. Almost like a teaser…just give them enough to want more.
Overall, you’ve go the makings of a good blog, you just need to tighten things up a bit. I know it’s difficult for most people to design their own sites, but if you search you can find some decent freebies out there. A spicy look goes a long way in driving traffic to the site and keeping them there. If you need any help with ideas hit me up…I’d be glad to help.
April 2nd, 2008 at 4:30 pm - Edit
Thanks a ton, Bryan. My brother said the same thing. I need to make the excerpts a little more curiosity-forming. I’ll definitely hit you up for more ideas.
I never realized it would be this complicated trying to get it to all fit together smoothly. I’ll definitely be doing more experiments to make the information more accessible.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:43 pm - Edit
Luke, I am always worried about how my blog appeals to others too. I thought that talking about how I could improve would be boring. Whenever I did nobody really commented or told me how to improve my site. Feedback from the readers is really important though. And about the tomatoes, did you mean netdisaster.com? About improving your site, if you could edit things without having to learn html/css/php I bet you would. The theme is good, nice feeling to the blog. Like Bryan said, you could net the readers more with the teaser. If I didn’t know it was a good post to read I probably wouldn’t have clicked on it. Also, if it’s possible, at the end of the teaser have something that says, “click here to read the rest of this post” or something like that. Then they will know where to go. Good job so far! I am no expert, young as I am, but those are a few of my opinions.
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:37 pm - Edit
Well, you already mentioned things you are working on so it’s tough to say. But I guess I’ll just toss a few things that came to mind right from the beginning…
It seems you lack a brand for yourself because the theme is pretty plain. Although plain is not necessarily a bad thing, you just need something to make you stand out more. Maybe just get a header designed especially for you.
If your theme is to make 10K in one week, you should probably start making money and keep updating your progress from the beginning. Though, 10k is a VERY hard goal, but it’s definitely doable. But if you get to that point, you’ll be making more than most A-listers!
But to add to the 10k in one week, how are you planning on doing that? Just from this blog? In general including a day job? All your online ventures? Just curious…
Jay
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:57 am - Edit
Jay and Nathaniel — Thank you so much for the advice and constructive criticism.
Nathaniel: I can see how a “read more” kind of tag may be in order. I like things simple, but it shouldn’t be confusing or too vague. So I’ll keep working on this. When I started the blog I made sure to enter text in the “excerpt” field because I read something saying this was good for SEO — less duplicate content. Also I feel it looks nicer, more digestible. But like you say, too little information isn’t a good thing.
Jay: The 10k/week standard really increases the importance of site design. In order to make that much, I either need some smashing content, a killer theme, or a lot of promotion — I probably can’t do it without all three. I’d definitely be a top A-lister if I was making that much from a single blog. Branding is essential. Chip once suggested that my site has a “star wars” like feel, and I’m trying to think of legal ways to capitalize on that…
I do have other ideas for increasing my income aside from blogging. But I’m gonna shoot for this A-lister goal anyway. Better to over-shoot than under-shoot. With a strong income from blogging, I’ll have lots of credit available to invest in real estate, red worm composting systems, and more. I will write some more about my plans for this in a full-length post.
Maybe I’ll eventually split it into two 10k/week entities, one online and one offline. Then I can have my cake and eat it too…
I really need a preview post option, I just realized. Darn, my site is noobish!
April 6th, 2008 at 7:59 am - Edit
[…] Luke invites readers to share their opinion about his blog. […]
April 9th, 2008 at 12:12 pm - Edit
Think the content and blog is fairly decent (albeit undermonetized
) - however I HATE the way posts are displayed on your front page - it is pretty confusing and you should get it sorted out.
When I first came to your blog, I had no idea that the posts were long and thought you were making posts that were a couple sentences long, each.
April 9th, 2008 at 12:55 pm - Edit
Thanks Jason! Looks like we have a verdict… I’ll switch to using actual excerpts and see how that goes.
Update: I’m now using the Post Teaser plugin.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:51 pm - Edit
hallo. i have a new blog. i think your web is about jurnalism. but i think you need more colour with you make your website have a good colour. i think the colour of your text is not good. i think blue is not correct with your web