The Geek Brewery

It’s a brand new year. On my previous post, I’ve shared a short summary of my 2008 as well as my goals for this year — in case you haven’t read it yet. Promise, it’s worth it.

I’m currently on the process of removing clutter in this blog in almost all aspects, from the technical slash geek side down to the content. I’m planning to do this project for the entire month of January. I intended to dedicate that much time because I don’t want to set an unrealistic goal as I always did for the past few years. Those unrealistic goals just brought me disappointments to myself, and I don’t want that to happen.

In this post, I’ll be sharing my insights on my initial stage of the big revamp. I hope you’ll share yours, too.

Paid Reviews; those were the days

While reviewing my old blog posts (mark the useless ones for deletion), I’ve realized that it’s been a very long time since I made  a paid review. It was still dated April 17, almost 9 months ago. To my last count, I made 10 of them. From those eleven, one signifact thing I learned aside from having my Pagerank penalized by Google was that I make superb reviews. To further strenghthen the statement, let me boast my success in a local review-writing contest.

Those were the days. I earned a lot from them but it costed my blog’s Pagerank and credibility. To date, I don’t have any plans to continue writing paid reviews for stuff I haven’t really tried. I’m planning to focus more on making good and credible content.

Poor Layout

Lately, I’ve been reading web design and web development websites. I sure grasped a lot of good lessons and ideas from the experts. Reviewing the layout of my blog, I saw a lot of aspects I’ve overlooked; as follows:

1. The search form was not that visible right away. When users get lost, they usually look for the search form. My search form before was stuck on the middle of my sidebar making it hard to see. I decided to relocate it on the most prominent part of the sidebar, the topmost area.
2. The area above the fold was a total disaster. The area above the fold refers to the first area seen after pageload. My initial remedy was to remove the big advertisement block. I’m planning to reduce the height of my top horizontal navigation bar soon.
3. What’s clickable, what’s not? On some areas of the blog such as the top horizontal navigation bar, it was unclear which part was clickable or not. Initial action taken was to put an underline below the clickable text.
4. Advertisements were everywhere. Yes they were. Remedy was to put advertisements only on profitable posts.

A Better Theme from scratch while maintaining a same old feel

I’m thinking of making another theme for this blog while maintaining the same old feel. Maintaining the feel would be hard but as much as possible I’d try to.

Interesting topics?

Let’s hear it from you. You suggest any topic to be discussed here, who knows I might be interested on writing something about that, too. It’s okay if it’s not a geek stuff, I’ll try my best to put a geek touch on it. (laughs)