The Trendsetter

I am so busy writing my blog five days out of every week since August that I’ve neglected to dress my blog for success. Since I started blogging on writing, writing tips, reviewing books and more, I have always become entangled on the technical side of setting up the wordpress theme to make sure it will be more presentable to you - the reader. If it was a house, I must admit it is still a mess, and I’m unable to tidy-up the guest room.

Now that readers have stumbled upon my site I still haven’t spruced-up the layout so they will be comfortable and enjoy their visit. Please forgive me, but even if I am familiar with the computer scripts, the technical sides of blogging just wears my brain out. There are so many themes; so many plugins and widgets to chose, yet so little time to peruse them all.

Do I have a choice? Can I just blog without taking care of the technical issues? The answer is a big fat NO! I forgot that when I decided to set up my blog, I am also responsible for the layout, the widgets and security so that when my guests come for a visit they feel safe and don’t receive a big fat pulsing headache when viewing the layout. So, I have to drag myself to tidy-up the layout.

In order to make the blog more reader friendly, I have installed several plugins for my wordpress green theme. Here are several of the tasks recently performed:

1. Installed the sitemap. The sitemap is similar to the function of an archive, but it is arranged based on categories. So, if the reader wants to find out what had been written in the past month, they can check it out through the sitemap. I used the dagondesign.com sitemap plugin.

2. Installed another dagondesign.com contact plugin for my blog. It makes it easy for the reader to contact me and this plugin is also spam-proof.

3. Moved the search form on the top of the right side bar. This will make it easy to find if the readers want to search for a specific title or keyword. I also should have installed the tag cloud plugin, but I think it made the side bar more crowded.

4. Installed the feedburner headline animator just in case the reader’s interested to add it to their site so they can easily read it at their convenience.

5. Located feeds of different media listed to right side bar for readers to subscribe based on their media preferences.

6. Added a subscriber form managed by feedburner to each blog topic for readers to fill in their email address if they want to subscribe to the content. It will be delivered by feedburner to the reader’s email every day five days a week.

7. Provided links to related articles below each post so readers can read other relevant articles.

8. Added links to other social media book marks - like digg, stumbleupon, del.icio.us - as well as an email link for readers to send my blog to friends.

So far this is what I have done to prepare my blog for readers. I will continue to improve the layout, tweak it and learn as much as possible about all the technical terms used in the blogsphere. I am still new to all the blog jargon, but I will make sure I will take care of the technical side and maintain it on regular basis.

If you have not done any of the above things that I’ve listed, you better get started. This is only for the wordpress users though. Other blogger’ software may be different. I know there is more for me to do to help my readers feel comfortable when they visit my blog and read my posts. I will try to become a nice host and I hope I will able to do just that.

Welcome to my writing blog!