Review My Blog, Please

[Jim]

My blog has been going for nearly a month, and it has been a success, quite a few regular visitors, etc.

http://www.jamesgill.me.uk/

Please tell me what I can do to improve it, thanks.

[Submerge]

The blog is going in the right direction, I've been following it for awhile. Your RSS feed is in good territory for being a month old, your Technorati score is great for one month old. Your subscribe section is a bit clutters, maybe drop the drop-down box to a new line. The MyBlogLog widget across the top is unique. Other wise everything is nice. :)

[Jim]

Thanks Submerge! I am very impressed with the amount of subscribers i've had. I'll look into the drop down menu ;)

Thanks for your very positive review Submerge :cool:

[Submerge]

No problem, I enjoy your site. It's nice to see a person grow in the web industry.

But I do have another suggestion. For you links section you have links for blog and websites. I think it would look a lot sexier, and easier for the visitor if you separated the section into links & blogs. That way if someone wanted to visit another persons blog, they wouldn't have to sort through a list cluttered with websites.

[Jim]

Ahh, never thought of that. That would look pretty awesome, I'll do that tonight :cool:

Thanks again submerge, highly appreciated.

[boron]

In short :) :

1. Site opens slow. 3-10 seconds to load fully. Speed test (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/wso.php?url=http://www.jamesgill.me.uk/) shows (what is obvious) that images take the greatest responsibility for this.

DNS Lookup shows an Open DNS problem (http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/dnsreport.ch?domain=jamesgill.me.uk) (red alert).

From this DNS Timing test (http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/dnstime.ch?name=jamesgill.me.uk&type=A) someone can conclude it's a slow hosting server, but I haven't had that feeling. Asking hosting owner for a test file to download can give the most accurate answer. You can ask for that Open DNS server issue also.

You can check this detailed site validation report (http://r.netmechanic.com/toolbox/summary.cgi?f=f/112/073/0636/15-01909/&s=NetMechanic&fv=5&ft=3)(HTML, spelling, broken links). Screenshots of your site in Opera, Firefox, Konqueror (http://browsershots.org/website/http://www.jamesgill.me.uk/).

2. DESIGN: Template is great, look smooth, ads are nicely embeded in the posts area. Giving opportunity to the best commenter to have a sitewide link to his blog is good advertising move - for you and him.

Photos of your MyBlogLog visitors are the very first thing noticed - they slow down site loading a lot though.

3. NAVIGATION: The whole heading banner area should be clickable. Search field on the top is great, I guess the next thing should be categories - so everyone can search without scrolling down. Dots [...] on the end of the short version of posts should be clickable. I don't get the trick with the hidding text in the footer...

4. CONTENT: It seems like a personal blog.

[Jim]

Thanks Boron, I'll look into all of that. I don't want the footer text to be hidden, it use to be white, but since i changed the link colour site-wide, it changed them too.

[Submerge]

Jim, ever thought about adding an actual contact form to your contact page? IT could really help.

Here's a download to the plug-in. http://www.douglaskarr.com/2006/09/22/wordpress-contact-form-with-spam-protection/

[Jim]

I had one before, but it looked really complicated :(

But thanks for that, I'll check it out now :)

*Ok, I've just installed it, and it looks awesome!

http://www.jamesgill.me.uk/contact-me/

Not sure if I need 'Subject' though.