Comments on: Going it alone: blog design

By: Design Tools — Kelly Rigotti: Marketing and Communication Consulting

Design Tools — Kelly Rigotti: Marketing and Communication Consulting — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 22:44:18 +0000

[...] Going it Alone: Blog Design (series) [...]

By: Vinh Le

Vinh Le — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 08:40:08 +0000

Good article. The only suggestion I would have is to make the subscribe button more prominent by using a different color as it sorts of hides in the sidebar. Also I think having the date near the article title makes it easier for visitors to see how old the article is before starting to read or having to hunt for it. Other than that, its a great blog.

By: Jordan

Jordan — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 07:41:11 +0000

@Sarah—A drawback of asking for opinions: ask three people, get five opinions. ;) You have to have more than just an FTP server for OpenX. The tech specs they list on the server front:

Server Requirements - Minimum *

Any web server with PHP support
PHP 4.3.10 or higher
MySQL 4.0.18 or higher

Server Requirements - Recommended

Operating System: Linux, Unix and BSD based operating systems.
Web Server: Apache or lighttpd.
PHP: PHP 4.3.10 or higher
PHP accelerator: eAccelerator, PHP_Cache or similar
Database: MySQL 5 or higher

To my knowledge, that's full-on web hosting (which you can get for y'know, $7/mo).

By: Sarah (Real Life)

Sarah (Real Life) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 02:14:10 +0000

I have to say that I don’t think it’s too busy at all. Of course, if you look at my blog, you’ll see that I like more images, although I probably have too many right now. I like how your lists are all consistent as far as color and form.

If there is anything you could do, it would be to add more color, or have a background with a little bit of texture.

I have a question that you or Michelle could probably answer. Can I use an ad server like openX (OpenAds) with Blogger? I’m under the impression you have to have your own ftp server.

By: Jordan

Jordan — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:14:20 +0000

@warillever—Thanks for the feedback. I’ve taken virtually everything out of the sidebars that I can already. I used to have the related posts display at the end of the post, but I felt like that was in the way of content, whereas in the sidebar they would be less obtrusive.

But I have been thinking about at least moving the blog consulting links below the fold.

By: warillever

warillever — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:47:21 +0000

I like the design of this blog. I love the tagline in script along the bottom of the page. My only criticism is that the sidebar is too busy. I understand that you want to showcase your consulting business, but there has to be away to accomplish that wit less text on the side of the page. Maybe lose the “Related Posts” and “popular on MamaBlogga” lists?

By: Jordan

Jordan — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:33:20 +0000

Michelle—ABSOLUTELY! You can do a ton of things in Blogger that you can’t do in other free blogging platforms. Despite the craziness of their made up programming language, making it almost impossible to mess with a lot of the “guts” of your blog, you can still get CSS and images for a custom look.

And Blogger is currently testing future posting: http://google.blognewschannel.com/archives/2008/02/17/blogger-adds-scheduled-posting/

By: Michelle at Scribbit

Michelle at Scribbit — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 06:43:14 +0000

Good advice–and I’d make a plug for Blogger here. It gets a lot of snide comments in the blogging community but even though WordPress allows a lot of customization the Blogger templates are the easiest thing to change and there actually are quite a few things you can do. If you host your own domain and get rid of the Navbar it’s hard to tell that you’re in Blogger. At least it’s been good to me–the only complaint I have is that you can’t time-release posts as you can in Typepad but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it coming soon. They’re constantly upgrading and tweaking.

Do I sound too biased?