Tag: Web Design

What I Look For In A Blog

Nick Momrik10 Comments

How does a site make it into my Weblogs I Read link list?

Friends

This is the easiest way because I’m definitely going to read up on what my friends have to say. At the same time though, my friends can’t have a garbage site and expect me to visit often.

Design

You must have a good design. I don’t want to see 20 different colors of text. I don’t want red Xs for broken images. I don’t want to see yellow text on a white background. Your design doesn’t have to knock my socks off, but it must be easy on the eyes.

Regular Updates

You should update on a regular basis. I don’t want to come to your site and find that you haven’t posted in weeks. How boring is that?!? Everyone has something to say, especially those of us with blogs. Your audience is waiting, so just say it. I may from time to time frequent a site that doesn’t update regularly, but for this to happen, is has to be worth my time (see next item).

Content

The most important part of a blog is the content. I don’t visit a site just to look at all the pretty colors. I click on your link for something to read. What I read better keep my interest or your site doesn’t have a chance. What keeps my interest? Well…I generally like blogs that mix it up a bit. Sometimes I visit a site simply because it has a single focus, like technology or sports, but I prefer a little more. I like to read things that interest me combined with personal posts about the author’s life. I’d like to get to know the writer behind the words. A simple About Me won’t cut it, because those pages are not frequently updated. I want to read about your day at work/school once in awhile. I want to know where you went on vacation and what you did. If I don’t learn anything about you as an author, your site is just another page on the web. It feels more like a community when I can refer to a blog’s author by name.

I just cleaned up my list, so I’m looking for some new content to read. If you think you have what it takes or know a site that might, leave a comment and I’ll check it out.

New Styles

Nick Momrik8 Comments

If you notice on the “Main” section of the sidebar on the right there are now different styles that can be viewed for the site. There is just something about the GanGreen one that I don’t like…I need to change one of the colors or something once I figure out what is bothering me. I’m having some problems on the photos page and with saving the styles so that the one you choose is used on the other pages of the site.

Update: Whichever style you now select should be reflected across every single page on the site. 😀 I had attempted to use Alex’s Style Switcher Plugin for WP, but no matter how much I tried to hack the code, it didn’t want to work on the static pages of my site. So I used an old style switcher that is much simpler. I did have to add some PHP code to my gallery to make it work there, but it’s runnin well now…I think.

Update #2: I’ve updated the GanGreen style and I think it’s 100% better than it was.

Update #3: Google Ads now change to match the styles. :mrgreen:

Time For A Design Change

Nick Momrik2 Comments

It’s been over 6 months since I’ve been running my blog, which also means 6 months for the design. It’s time for a change! This design is getting old on my eyes and it has a few problems that have crept in recently. Most noticeable is the problem with the Google ads. They like to flash at the top of the page when the site is loading or when using the tabbed sidebar. I’m really not quite sure what the new design will be…hell, I don’t even have any cool ideas right now. I need a burst of creativity to hit before I get started, but I also want to get a new design as soon as possible. I’d set a goal for the end of the month, but I’m going to Sacramento for a week so that won’t work. I’ll say by June 14th a new design will be alive and kicking!

Speaking of new designs…my friend David Branson has become a WordPress user and will be working on a design of his own. Right now he’s using one of the stylesheets created for the WP community in place of boring default one. When you get a minute check out his site, Deacon Blue.

Site Changes

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Over the past few days you may have noticed a few changes to the site. I removed the Shout Outs from the sidebar. I was the only one ever shouting so I figured it wouldn’t be missed. With them gone, the pages should load a little (fraction of a second) quicker. The other change is that I added a little hack next to the date/time of a post. It displays how long ago the post was made, which is useful for any visitors that are in a different time zone. Instead of figuring their offsets from EST to see how long ago a post was made, they can simple read in between the parenthesis.

I’m really happy with the way the site has come together over the past few months. My goal from the start was to keep it simple, but with a lot of functionality. I think I’ve succeeded so far and from the consistent increase in the number of visitors, so must others.

If you have any suggestions or criticisms that might help the site…I’m all ears.

Gallery Upgrade

Nick Momrik1 Comment

I just finished upgrading the Photos section of the site to use Gallery 1.4.2. The only reason I upgraded was because they had found a pretty big security hole in the previous versions of the software. I didn’t feel like having someone hack into my web server. The upgrade went pretty smoothly, except that I’ve lost all the hard work I put into hacking the Gallery code to make it valid XHTML 1.1. Oh well!

You’ll notice some design changes with it since I decided to use a portion of one of the skins that came with the new version. Gallery is a great piece of software, but I just wish they had worked a little bit at using some standard code. The first time I installed Gallery I took at least a few hours to hack the code so that it would all validate XHTML 1.1. I think I’m going to leave it this time around…at least for the time being. I’d rather get Windows installed on my new server (I had initially put Linux on it) so that I can install Linux on my old PC. The server is just too much power to have Linux sitting on it when all I really want to do is play around with Linux. It’s much smarter to harness that power for my main machine.

Weekend Update

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As you can probably tell from my posts this weekend, I’ve been messing/hacking with my site. I believe I made at least 3 posts related to web design. It really was a “geek” weekend for me.

On Saturday, I didn’t crawl out of bed until 1:30, which may be a new record. I never showered or changed my clothes the whole day actually. Woke up in the same clothes today that I fell asleep in Friday night. That might be another first for me. Showering is how I usually wake up for the day, but somehow I didn’t need it yesterday. I spent most of Saturday sitting right here at my computer, hacking code for WordPress, installing TFS Statistics, and tweaking other things on my site. Late that night I finally decided to watch a movie.

Today I’ve been busy doing laundry, taking out the garbage, and a few other things around the house. After Heather came back from the weekend at Steve’s we made a trip down to Prime Outlets in Birch Run for some shopping. I bought 2 pair of pants and 2 shirts from Haggar. I love that wrinkle free shit. Also made a stop at some sock store to look for king size socks. It’s not easy finding socks that fit my size 14 feet! I bought two more shirts and a cool brown corduroy jacket ($20) at Aéropostale.

That about sums up my excitement for the weekend.

Custom Error Pages

Nick Momrik3 Comments

I’ve had custom error pages on my site since it started, but today I added an awesome feature. It was great that the user was getting an error page with the same look and feel as my site, but I wasn’t getting any information from it.

I’ve added some PHP scripting so that whenever someone gets one of my error pages, I am sent an email with the URL they were trying to access, the referring page that has the broken link, time, date, visitor’s IP address. Now I’ll be able to track down broken URLs and resolve them.

Mr Bob’s Web Design has a great code generator and instructions for setting this up. When you do step 2, make sure to remove any blank lines at the end of functions.inc.php after pasting the code into it. If you don’t, you will get an error message on your error pages that the headers have already been sent.