RSS Feeds: When I'll quit browsing your blog within 10 seconds…
DISCLAIMER: This is a personal list of "dislikes" on blogs. I am certainly not saying you should dislike the same things that I dislike, but I thought I'd share them anyway. So here are my top dislikes in blogs. If you take any offence from this, then you can send me a cheque for it later — it's not free. :P
- Top flashing ad banners — I don't mind advertising on personal weblogs, but it should be subtle and shouldn't distract from the content. Top Flashing ad banners somehow gives a very cheap feel to your website.
- Embedded videos in the first two or three posts — I've already said that I don't like too many embedded videos on blogs. If I find more than a couple of posts with videos embedded in them in the home page, I'll close the window.
- Black background, white text/bright pink colours etc. — Even if you have great content, I won't like to read it because it's a strain on the eyes. Bright pink especially sucks.
- Poetry — If I find poetry on your blog, I'll escape… Best of luck with finding yourself a good publisher. :razz:
- A lot of SEO articles/your impressive web stats/how much you rule — Heh. Everybody loves reading about how many visitors you get each month and from where. Not me. Thanks anyway. Goodbye.
- I see words like "monetize", "favorite me", "technorati", "digg me", "youtube", "stumble me" etc in many places — Use nouns as nouns, not verbs. You probably fall into the above category.
- Default blogger/wordpress/xyz themes and templates — I have nothing against the default templates provided by blogging software, but the biggest problem is that they're default. Lots of people use them. Thousands, millions, trillions. Quadrillions. Unless your blog has really unique content, I probably am not interested much in it.
Should I explain my dislikes? No, I won't. Either you get it or you don't. :lol:
Hari writes about a wide variety of topics on his own blog, including "Humour, comics, tech, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then".
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Really need to get my act together and customize my layout :shock:
Lol at the poetry part :grin:
I don't really *object* to usage of certain nouns as verbs, but I draw the line at "favorite me" or "digg me". That sounds… ummm… :lol:
Thomas, your blog looks fairly unique…
[...] put up a guest post over at Untwisted Vortex listing seven things that are immediate blog turn-offs. These are things that Hari notices within the first 10 seconds of visiting any given blog and if [...]
I swear to you yesterday I came upon a blog that still had the 'Just another Wordpress blog' tagline. So, so sad!
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Be the man, stop working for him.
Regarding default templates: Not everyone can afford to get a professional looking custom built theme. 95% new bloggers stick to default templates for several years…
That's a valid point. However, I've never paid for a website template and mine's completely personalized. I do have a hosted space that I put my site on, but before I looked around for a faster solution to my growing site, I was hosted on a free host. So, I customized my theme. What I did at that time was to go to the Wordpress Theme Viewer (there were a few back then) and pick out what I liked. I then uploaded it to my theme directory and away I went.
With Blogger, there are about 30 templates to choose from and Wordpress.com accounts have a large choice as well. So, there really isn't any reason to stay with the default theme. Even if you like, say, Kubrik, you can change the header color.