Courtney from Great Satan’s Girlfriend requested a Free Blog Review at Inspirit. Her blog is themed on combating anti-American propaganda, tyrannies, intolerant regimes, militias and foes of enlightenment through rants on politics and news.
Whoever I know, who uses this template for their Blogger/Blogspot problems have the same kind of problems with their blog design. I’ll talk about all those points in this post, but before that would like to clear up one very important point to all those who use this template, or intend to use it.
Whatever is the theme of your blog- personal, rambling, ranting, flaring, or whatever- you’re blogging so that people read your blog! So, you’ll have to take care of this thing while formatting your posts while writing the titles, headings and the posts, that they are ‘readable’.
If you ignore the layout and structure, and the colors used on Courtney’s blog for a few moments and read through the content, you’ll see that what she writes makes good sense and points. What she writes is a clear idea and is as clearly conveyed/presented through the text. Great Satan Girlfriend’s content will be interesting for anyone who is concerned about politics and global affairs like those, Courtney talks about. And there is quite a large chunk of society who would like to read this kind of stuff.
Now bring the excluded factors back in- the colors used, the management of space, layout and structure, etc. and give a second thought. Would you still like to read through, to the bottom? Most of you will disagree. Here are what the problems are, in my humble opinion:
- Update your color scheme. The links on your blog strain my eyes! Blue on blue is almost unreadable. It could be excused if you linked a word or two, but at many places on your blog, a single link extends over many lines in a go. That’s a wrong practice again. Only link the relevant keywords of a text to any web page. Not the whole paragraph itself!
- Increase the ‘readability’ of your blog by changing all the text in alternate case, to Sentence Case. It looks better that way.
- Categorize the widgets in the sidebar. Put similar things together- I mean those of same type and similar dimensions. An example is the ‘Eye Candy Ration’ thing. And so with the other things.
The next important thing is making the maximum and optimum use of the vast space in the content block. Using images in each post is good, I practice that myself. But doing it right, matters. Try using them inline with the post content (better, on the right hand side) rather than above it and just below the post title. It’ll suit better to your template.
I had once done a critical review of Angry Jed’s blog and it really had an effect. Angry Jed’s blog was almost in the same state as yours, but he did a commendable job working on it as I suggested and as he wanted… and today his blog looks a lot better. You should take a look and especially see the arrangement of buttons in the footer. I’d be glad if my review of your blog could help you. Drop me a comment.
Cheers.