Blog suggestions please

[Lee Baldwin]

Hi, my name's Lee Baldwin and the link for my blog is at the end of this post. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to improve my 'the Mechanics of Happiness' blog? I'm new to the whole blogging thing, I want the blog to promote my books eventually but at the moment I just want to get as many visitors as possible along to generate some interaction and create a buzz about the place.

I know I'm leaving myself open to being sent up here.. but any suggestions that anyone has either the time or inclination to make will be greatly appreciated and hopefully contain not too many profanities!

Thanks for your help.

[pianoperformer]

You're asking for honesty so...

• Where's the title on your front page? it seems not to have a title, which is unusual.
• I think your domain is too long. I usually prefer domains no more than 15 characters or so.
• No offense, but I think it is all around rather, boring...I mean there's not much concrete advice, and it is all pretty vague.
• Your about page is pretty nice; I'd suggest maybe injecting that same style into your other posts. Right now I have trouble keeping interest.

[jamestl2]

There's a lot more to it when asking for "help".

What kind of help are you looking for? Optimizing suggestions? Marketing tactics? Target Audience? Or what?

[Alexjstrandberg]

problogger.net thats a good place to start. He talks about A LOT of great stuff on there.

[Apollia]

The best tip I can think of at the moment is to make the text color darker, since light grey on a white background is a bit hard to read (at least for me).

Best wishes,
Apollia

[Brutha]

The header doesn't look right.
Why isn't the text centered?
What kind of color is the shirt of the guy on the left? I think it's white and the image of him is to dark.

[Jarrod]

From everything I've read blogging takes awhile to generate good amounts of traffic providing you are being pro-active and marketing your blog.

Look for blogs about blogging, learn from people who are teaching about blogging. Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging - ProBlogger is one resource but there are many more.

Visit your favourite blogs and see what is common about them that makes them good. Then try and take the good elements and build them into your own blogging.

Put yourself in the shoes of a new visitor (who is likely to hang around for less than 10 seconds if they don't see something they like). How do you feel when you see an image that takes up most of your screen with little text. What is the thing that attracts most of my attention when I first see the site? Is that something that will keep a reader there, or have them move on after looking at it.

Also include links to the people who you get images from

Good luck

[Pegasus]

Originally Posted by Apollia

The best tip I can think of at the moment is to make the text color darker, since light grey on a white background is a bit hard to read (at least for me).

Best wishes,
Apollia

I second this!

..

[Elenny]

Ever since I read this post a few days ago, I have been going back to this blog. For some reason it draws me in (although it doesn't keep me in for long), but let me give you my .02 cents.

1. The text should definitely be darker. The posts are very hard to read.

2. Perhaps your writing style is too deep for me, but I just don't understand most of what you're trying to say (and yet, for some reason, I keep going back to your blog).

So maybe you're on to something, but I think it needs to be organized better so you can get your point across to regular people like me.

[impaul99]

I wrote an article this weekend with 50 tips I recommend for improving a Blog.

I think a lot of them may apply to you.

Here's the link:

50 Tips to Make Money Blogging by Building a Better Blog | How to Make Money Doing What You Love

Hope it helps.

[Lee Baldwin]

Thanks to you all for taking the time to put your suggestions in, I really appreciate it and will add all these things in to the pot in my quest for blog heaven.

[VacMan]

Lee,

The first thing I'd change before anything is to take out the green bars under your header graphic.

In fact, if you can, I'd shorten the height of your header too.

The reason why I say that is because you can't see any of your content unless you scroll down.

You can't even tell the page changes when you click on your categories/pages because all the changes happen "below the fold" (the area you have to scroll down to see.)

When people don't see what they want right away they get confused and leave.

Show more off your "goods" up top and you'll probably see more success too.

Best of luck!

[Minsc]

Some suggestions(mostly technical):
-Your page is 2MB big and most of it is images. Get rid of most of those. 200k is a good upper limit for the total size of the page.
-Drop the goofy-looking guys in your header. They make your site look like a scam. Also, make it like 60px high and 780px wide max(which is some random number, not any exact statistic, so don't trust it too much), then center it horizontally, or just make it text.
-Get rid of every image you have in the posts. Not only do they take up space, but they make your content look as generic as the images. If you really have to have them, make them 200x150ish greyscale JPEGs.
-You could move all that stuff to the right of your blog over to the left side, and make it smaller horizontally.
-Just because you can use background-image doesn't mean you should replace every single image tag with it. Make the top header a normal image and give it an alt tag, since it's not in the background of anything. Ditto for that little RSS button. You are wasting so much effort with that. There is no reason to emulate a regular image with CSS.
-I guess you could get rid of the "the" in your URL if you really wanted to. It'll cost you $8 and you'll have to make the old one redirect.
-There are 30-some tabs on the menu bar at the top. The purpose of a menu bar is not to link to every page on your site. Make some sort of "best of" page and link to all of your happiness-related articles from there.
-After you merge the far right side of the page with the far left, get rid of that "Pages" part as it is useless. You could replace it with a "recent posts" or whatever part instead. Get rid of that neat little RSS text-link and button and add in a giant one on the top of the far-left without any piece-of-paper-with-a-plus-sign-bar over it, centered. Then drop that "Meta" bar unless it does something other than help you administrate your site; you can bookmark all of that.
-Make that header link you to the home page.
-Once you drop all of the tabs you could make two: "Best Of", and "About". You could also add an archives page like on Steve's site, and if you do, link that text on the archives block to the main archives page.

[beautyscientist]

I agree that the style of writing is a bit wierd. It works for me if I imagine it being read out by Stephen Fry. (That may not work for Americans - I don't think he is well known over there.)

[Lee Baldwin]

Continued thanks for all your suggestions. Someone actually did the blog layout for me based upon their design so the whole thing is an ongoing experiment - except for the content which I have to put my hands up and accept responsibility for (lol). I'll get chopping and changing. It is very much appreciated.