Feedback sought on improving the design of this blog

On February 6, 2012, in About me, Blogging, by Sanjeev Sabhlok

(Writing from India: fantastic experience earlier today morning of Delhi's new – private – PPP based – international airport; truly world class; will write more later, time permitting).

Bhagwad Jal has been kindly providing me with useful tips on how to manage this blog over the past year – such as on how various features/plugins work. Thanks for that, Bhagwad. Much appreciated. And, of course, I'm grateful to Anubhava Srivastava of FTI for introducing me to WordPress in the first place.

I'm a blog novice; still learning.

I've now received very helpful feedback on the design and looks of this blog and would like to seek your assistance to study this matter further.

The comment received

Sanjeev: I am not sure if anyone else has already mentioned this to you but your blog re-design is probably turning off some visitors (if not a lot).

It cuts of words to the left/ does not feel navigation friendly and appears too aggressive (not sure what word to use).

Hope this makes sense.. This is not meant as a criticism at all but a genuinely friendly observation..

I would not want people switching off frm reading your blog merely because of a design issue/

My response

I've been fighting against web hacking of my blog for long, but have not changed its theme or design since I picked the free Whitehouse theme in mid-2010. Not sure exactly what's the (new) visibility issue. Would you be able to provide a screen shot? I'll also ask readers about what they think /experience.

In brief, I'm always grateful to receive such feedback since I'm can't possibly know (without spending too much time on this) whether this blog is working properly. I'd be grateful if you could provide me with screen shots of any difficulties you might be experiencing with this blog.

Since my knowledge of how to fix such matters varies from poor to dismal, it would be of great help if you could also provide me with directions on how to fix the identified problem. Please write to me at sabhlok AT gmail DOT com (Note that I'm slowly winding down my yahoo account which has very poor search features and doesn't have any of the flexibility of gmail.)

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3 Responses to “Feedback sought on improving the design of this blog”

Sanjeev Sabhlok says:

February 6, 2012 at 7:09 am

Feedback sought on improving the design of this blog http://t.co/K7KyW9Mk #aboutme #blogging
All Indian Blogs says:

February 6, 2012 at 7:20 am

Feedback sought on improving the design of this blog http://t.co/lDWOpMYX
Polevaulter Donkeyman says:

February 13, 2012 at 9:49 am

Sanjeev–

My issues with the blog are:

1. Commenting form — By default you have a rich text form for submitting comments. This makes it more cumbersome to add comments (especially of one wants to bold the text, add links, and cut and paste. Can you provide a commenting form which accepts plain text and recognises a few html codes enough for emphasis and linking? That will make commenting easier.

2. You use a lot of colors (background/foreground) which make your text distracting. A simple minimal format (e.g. only bold, italics, underline without colours) would make reading your text far easier,

3. Excessive ads — This may be slightly difficult to touch upon since, I am assuming, that you make money of these ads to support the costs of running the site. Specifically I am addressing the ads from mgid (which appear between the text of the column and related posts),

4. Your right hand column is also extremely busy — it is packed with social media, a category list, a tag cloud, adsense ads.

5. As an example Bhagwad Jal Park’s website comes of as much easier on the eyes. But then again I like the minimal look (like Google) and you don’t.

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