Started a blog..

BlastedGlute

I started a blog the other day because, well why not.

www.paulwilsonmedia.com

Still plenty of tweaking to do. Never used wordpress before but I'm liking it so far!

Any thoughts?

shemwhistler

Nice clean design, is that an off the shelf theme?

I was disappointed that the RSS feed link was missing from the widgets on the right hand side, as soon as you put that on I'll be subscribing.

One thing I notices was a lot of the posts were in Uncategorized, you'll probably want to spend a bit of time getting the categories in order and the posts tagged correctly, that way you can have the wee category widget on the right hand side. This will be useful if you want to cover a number of topics e.g. photography and art as separate entities.

I think you can even set a default category for posts, so you could set that up for photog stuff.

Hope that's of some use.

*eadaoin

It is a very nice clean theme, nice work You might want to get rid of the 'Proudly powered by Wordpress' line in your footer?

But I often wonder about photoblogs that have a similar layout to yours - if the purpose is to showcase your photography, would it not be better to choose a design that will display your photos in full in the main post, rather than a smaller image beside the text?

shemwhistler

That's a good point, is this on wordpress.com or is it Wp hosted elsewhere?

I don't know anything about .com, but I've hosted a few wp blogs and there are some good gallery plugins you can get to show case your pics.

dinneenp

for me the 'header' section is too big. Through customization you should be able to reduce the blank spaces above and below.

I presume you're going to add more sections to the navigation bar, currently you only have home and about. remove the about while it's not populated yet (currently has This is an example of a WordPress page...)

good luck with it. I know how long it takes to tweek, fix, customize a site, this is the version of mine that I'm finally happy with.

Cheers,
Pa.

BlastedGlute

thanks for the feedback folks!

It's a wordpress powered plugin thats hosted on a friends server. Having some extension problems atm in that I want to be able to have unique URL's for each page so I can link to direct articles. But that'll get sorted. I dont want to turn it into a spam fest for every photo I take or whatever. I'm going to try and maintain a level of quality there and only put up stuff I think will actually be of interest. I've looked around at a few things I like on other blogs and tried to use those ideas. Having the thumbnail image hotlink to the article is important I think. Cutting down the size of each so you just get a short intro and a preview image. I need to fix the side bars pretty soon maybe over the weekend Illl make some more buttons in photoshop.

I cant actually see an About Page And it's not showing as there actually being one in my admin dash or even on another laptop im looking at. Can everyone else see that?

I guess it wouldnt hurt to bump the top area a bit but im not entirely sure it's going to kill any interest in reading on a a bit. I'll see what the craic is with moving layout elements although I dont want to screw with formatting just so I can do that.

Anyway thanks for the help guys!

One more thing, how do I add an RSS feed? It wants a URL for my RSS feed before I can use the widget but I dont know what that is

dinneenp

didn't see about at first, after some clicks saw it. can't see it again now...

shemwhistler

The RSS feed options should be in the meta widget, the widget that has the admin login link.

Jonnykitedude

Paul thats pretty cool, I have been thinking about setting up a blog for the last few months but just havent got around to it, but after looking at yours I must get the finger out!

Cheers

BlastedGlute

go for it johnny, get over to wordpress and figure out the basics, from there you can decide if you want to go solo and get yourself a URL or whatever, the actual wordpress hosting is perfect though I just wanted a nicer looking URL for some business cards I need to do up!