Blog Improvement Project week 4: Blog Basics

In a nutshell, here’s Kim‘s assignment for the next few weeks:

 

This week we’re going to focus on blog basics — when a new reader gets to your site, how easy is it for them to find out basic information about you and what your blog is about? 

Here are the specifics she has asked us to work on.  Of course, any other tweaking is encouraged:

• Write (or update) your “About Me” Page — This would be write my “About Me”, since I don’t have one.
• Update your contact information – yep.  Right now I have a contact form.  Will add an email to the front page and see how much more spam comes in.
• Add some sort of picture of yourself (if you’re comfortable with that) – OK.  I’ve cropped one from a reading with Brunonia Barry, and I have it over at WordPress, Book Blogs, and Facebook.  Ideally I’d love to have more of a caricature, or a Wall St. Journal type “thumbprint”, but I don’t know how to go about finding a resource for this …
• Update your Blogroll — Blogging Startup has a good series on blogrolls starting with “Does My Blog Need A Blogroll?” — check out some of the other entries, they’re pretty short and interesting.  Yes, I should update this every quarter or so …
• Create a link to your Archives on your front page – I have archives and a search box, but will review the placement on the page.
• Add a link (or make sure a link is there) so readers can subscribe to your blog via RSS – got it!
• Get to work on other basic blog maintenance you’ve been meaning to do.  – This requires another set of bullet points:

1. I must figure out how to get my pic (for lack of a better symbol) on the URL bar
2. edit CSS so the search box doesn’t overlap my page tabs
3. delete wish list tab and keep an online wish list link
4. Can you see anything else that’s missing or needs adjusting?!?

I’ll check back with an update post before the end of the month … eeks, it’s a short month!

Thanks for the encouragement and guidance, Kim!