About the reviews and site update
Site Reviews
I have had a really good response to the blog reviews that I have been doing this last week. I have also had a number of questions thrown at me. I will try to answer some through this little blog.
Who am I? I am a former teacher (adult ed – small business management, management, marketing) who misses the reading and marking of assignments. I also like roaming around reading other people’s blogs. So I thought, why not put the two together. My aim is not to denigrate any blog, rather if required, to offer positive constructive criticism.
There are side benefits too. Other readers who visit my site see these reviews and may just visit your blog – increasing your traffic. Another benefit is the back link I provide to the pages I review. Every review I write includes a link to the blog, known I believe as a deep link. Please correct me if I am wrong. A lot of the bloggers are coming in and writing comments to my reviews – this is also providing a deep link – if you do decide to comment, please include a link to your page. One final benefit to the blogs I review. I do read the blogs and I do look at the ads and the links. If I see something I like then I follow the link from your site. I have made a few modifications to my site today and included some new ads – ads that I have discovered from other sites. If it was your site that I found this ad on and it pays fro referrals, well you have just received another referral.
I have to admit that none of this is altruistic. I benefit too. First I am getting a back link on your site to mine – if you decide to keep the comments and not delete them (your choice). Second I get a little more traffic to my site (if you haven’t visited yet, please visit my other site, Just 4 Families – this link will open in a new window) – the more traffic the better. This extra traffic of course comes from either the blog owner checking their review, or from visitors to your site who want to check the review, and I hope, my site too.
The bottom line: I do it because I enjoy it – it creates more traffic and back links for everyone – finally, it provides blog owners with a bit of feedback on their sites, and if site is good, then you should be proud of it, if it could use a bit of brush up, then a bit of friendly advice never goes astray.
Site Update
I have made a few revisions to my site today, moving widgets around, adding a few more widgets and making some of the widgets a little narrower to fit the side bars. From my end the page seems to load a lot slower now. If you notice the same thing please leave a comment. I will trial and error remove some of the new widgets until I find the culprit. I don’t mind sacrificing an ad widget if it increases the load speed.
Sometime this weekend I will also be including a blog review catalogue (on a separate page) which will list all the sites I have reviewed.
To all visitors who have left comments, many thanks. Please check back regularly.
Les
the radical blogger
You asked in this post about the widgets and loading times. Your site seems quite fast loading for me, so no delays noticed from here.
A word about widgets and WordPress though. I have seen lots of comments and talked to a few people I know about widgets really slowing down the page loading of some WP sites. I am no expert and don’t know why this is, but don’t use widgets for this reason. It’s too bad it is such a widespread and well known problem. It seems to hold true even in WP2.3. Some claim that WP installations can be optimized to overcome this, but the average user has no idea how to do that.
I have not read anything that indicates that the developers of WP are working on, or have even acknowledged any problem with widgets, so who knows when and if it will be addressed.
The WP team and even the volunteers who help on the support site seem to be a bit defensive and elitist about WP so things pretty much get done the way the experts want with less regard for the inexperienced user.
As an example, many have complained that WP is too labor intensive with too many steps to upgrade versions. The response is always that it is not hard or a lot of work to upgrade versions. Plus, now the Dev Team has decided to put updated versions out on an accelerated schedule.
Even though I like WP and can upgrade and customize without much trouble, I do think they need to listen to all their user suggestions and complaints. I have a feeling widgets may fall into this situation.
-Will