My business/Personal Blog . . . Please review!

+rep for honest appraisals of my business/personal blog at
http://www.taichijourney.com

I've just completely changed the theme, added some widgets, etc.

Also if anyone knows why the avatars for mybloglog aren't showing up, I'm kind of curious about that!

Thanks

 

It's nice and simple. I like it. Although I don't like the overflowing images on the right. It looks like a css mistake (although I know it isn't), but that's just me.

Well, I don't know, maybe they're winning me...

 

very good design,hopefully got very good results

 

Thanks for the feedback guys . . . Rep given.

About the images on the right . . . I appreciate what you said about that. I will ask a few other people around me about that, because the way the theme is designed, and with the css the way it is, those images seem to 'pop' which I think is kind of desirable. I'll ask around and try to get some end user feedback on it in addition to other webmasters.

What do you guys think about using a link to my myspace profile (one of them, anyhow) to add more targetted people to my friends list? Most of the traffic I've gotten has been from myspace since the site isn't indexed or ranking for anything much yet, so it seems like that's a good way to build some good will and a relationship with other people who are interested in my niche (and spam them to death everytime I update something!). . .

Another thing I'm interested in - has anyone ever farmed out the maintenance and development of their websites?

I have several that are all in the same basic niche that I don't personally want to deal with, but everything is set up and easy for even a novice to deal with, so I have a few people who want to run them in exchange for having their ads run 70% of the time, and I'll do some promotion when I start really hammering for traffic.

Other than forum admins and what not, has anyone ever been like a virtual landlord like that?

My only interest in most of these sites is link juice to 1 or 2 of my main sites in this niche, so if people can regularly source content and do admin stuff, it seems like it will free up alot of my time to work on my core interests and competencies. Mainly 1 or 2 keyword .com's and a product site. Basically I'll use the others to compete with myself via adsense/affiliate stuff, etc.

Anyway - thanks again for the review.

Anybody have an idea why avatars for mybloglog aren't showing up? Still no reply from their support folks.

J

 

Actually I hadn't looked before, but it's not right in Internet Explorer.

I went ahead and resized the images themselves to fit within the context of the navbar without overflowing, but with i.e. I'm still getting the navbar at the bottom of the page, rather than at the side.

Does anybody know a specific fix for this? It looks really bad.

I've done some searches for a workaround, but so far nothing has worked.

 

nice & simple design but make it colourful (i suggest) as tht of image!

 

Looks really good to me. I am using FF and it looks perfect.

The mybloglog reader images are showing up fine here - Duzins has shown up fine. I like how you have added the adsense in at the bottom of the post so it is not intrusive.

Minor Issues:

1. Dont like the vertical dashed line too much

2. That snapshot thing that pops up gets annoying

You need to add the Technorati buttons in as well.

Hope you do well with it

 

everything looks fine, it's a well organized site

Perhaps add some content to the left side of the header image, it looks plain as it is.

The mybloglog avatars looks fine, I see mine on there as username xaver

I also didn't like the snap popups when you hover over the links, it kinda slows things down too much.

 

I would move your header's text to the left side and I'd make the color grey. Not sure if the flower fits in there.. but atleast this "balances" the header off.

 

It's a nice site - really like what you've done with the SnapShots stuff.

You might want to list your site over at martialarts.toplisted.net

Good luck with it!

 

I appreciate everyones input, and rep has been slung all around.

The only thing I'm still stuck on is getting the navbar to show up right in internet explorer. Several websites that I've checked say that there's an ie specific problem, but I haven't really been able to find the resolution.

Also - I know that it would be best to create another topic about this, but I don't really like to clutter things up, so -

Does anyone have any niche specific recommendations for connecting with the larger blogging community in this industry/niche?

As it stands my plan is just to fire up seo elite or something and shoot off some courteous emails requesting to guest blog or offering to guest blog for other people for anyone that gets returned on a niche+blog search.

I'll also check around mybloglog for people doing similar things.

I'de be interested in hearing any specific suggestions for increasing the (relatively) targetted readership and subscription base of my blog.

I haven't really done anything beyond burn and churn for the past couple of years, so I'm not really up to speed on how to efficiently, yet ethically and unobtrusively develop a readership.