Give it to me hard-a noob ventures into blogging

“You might want to be more clear about the focus of the blog in the sub-header.
It took me a while to figure out that this wasn’t some Science Fair project.”

I agree, thank you.

“The layout is good for what it is.
Why the small thumbnails. We don’t need the flys to scale. Enlarge!”

I was trying to be considerate of people with slow connections. Is that not a valid concern?

“A splash of color for the background of the sidebar or something wouldn’t kill ya.”

You’re probably right, I’ve survived incredible amounts of color in my life. Perhaps the lack of gratuitous color will appeal to people who read books (without pictures). OTOH if I wanto to appeal to average people I should probably take your advice.

“Don’t be so paranoid. Lose the watermarks on the photos. No one’s going to steal your pictures of flies. If they do. Who cares?”

The funny thing is that I didn’t even realize I was being paranoid! The whole time I was watermarking the photos I kept thinking “if I watermark the photos and someone uses them I’ll get free advertising”. I will consider your suggestion and also seek psychiatric consul.

“Interesting info on flies.
Thanks for sharing.
FWIW, you won’t be invited over for dinner.”

FWIW I would rather spend my time with the flies anyway, thank you. ??

I was just teasing if it wasn’t obvious rspence. I changed the subtitle, what do you think?

Also, I originally wanted to color the header but lack teh skills.

Thanks.

I like the new sub head. Reallly helps.
I like the bigger images too.

If you could still add just a little color.
A little time in the WP documentation and you should be good to go.

I was teasing too.
Interesting topic. Can’t say I’ve seen anything like it.

Thanks for the feedback, it was very helpful.

I thought about inserting a colorful image into the top of the sidebar, at least until I figure out how to manipulate the theme.

I may also need to change my domain name because the manufacturer of the product has one that’s very similar. I’m just hoping it not too hard to switch over. I suppose the blog is new enough that I could recreate it from scratch if nothing else.

If I need to stop using blacksoldierflyblog.com I’m thinking of using goodflyblog.com instead. Any perspectives on how that might influence traffic?

I was just reading through the blog posts you made, and despite the fact I squirm at the thought of that many larvae in pots, as well as actually handling one, I found the site a really interesting read!

I don’t see any problem with the design at all, as it displays the content very well (clean and tidy) and found that the content was captivating enough to draw me away from anything but looking for more info in the navigation menu :p

Loved the use of the images by the way. It helped bring the site to life, and thus your logo doesn’t necessarily need to be all colourful if the photos are going to be that good!

Not sure how changing the blog url will affect your traffic I’m afraid. The only time I’ve really done that was when that site didn’t really get too much traffic so it didn’t matter. It was definitely worth the change though – the fansite ranks above the official site, which I think is due to WordPress being so accessible by search engines!

p/s: I think I’d remember ‘blacksoldierflyblog.com’ more easily than ‘goodflyblog.com’. Perhaps might want to consider the keywords that visitors are using to reach your site.

One thing you can do to add some visual interest is to play with typography. Just changing your titles to a serif font with the rest of the text sans-serif, and possibly a nice color, would be enough of a start.

Here’s an example of a graphics-lean site with some nice typography:
https://www.stopdesign.com/ Even tho it’s 3-column, the eye and brain don’t go into visual overload.

Just adjusting your title font would make a lot of difference and add a bit of punch.

Thanks!

mosey, I’m glad you found the content interesting, I’ll be adding to it constantly once I get myself organized. I agree that my current url is best, but I’m trying to be considerate of another blogger. I’ve asked them how they feel but haven’t heard from them yet. As far as the traffic implications, my blog is so new there really isn’t much to worry about yet.

jonimueller, I actually went with this title font because it was the only one that would fit it into one line. With the other fonts the first and second line overlapped and was distracting. I would also like to adjust text colors, but I haven’t figured out how to locate the code to make the changes yet. It took some blind luck for me to get the blog to validate so I’m hesitant to play with the coding much at this point.

I’m a little frustrated that my blog doesn’t show up with a google search (40 pages). I installed the All-in-one SEO plugin, but I’m not sure if I’ve used the right copy. I’ll have to study SEO some more to understand what to do. I had to laugh because this thread shows up fairly high in a search for “black soldier fly”!

Does anyone else think the watermarks are tacky? I’m not really that possessive, I just want to employ good marketing.

@bsflarva: I will look out for more updates then ??

Actually I never installed any SEO plugins for that site. Maybe I’m lucky in that the sites that I’ve created so far tend to be more ‘niche’ (unique keywords etc) as I imagine a site about Black soldier flies would be. All I did for the first few months was to focus on writing content, and at some point (still trying to figure out when – it was definitely a couple of months – am wrangling with the stats program at the moment!) I started noticing a lot more traffic from Google, which now accounts for most of the site’s traffic referrals, for better or for worse, since there aren’t that many sites linking to my own >_<.

My only conclusion is that content is king (or queen) and if it’s there and it’s relevant, Google will pick it up regardless.

p/s: I have no idea if this is relevant, but I did change the permalinks to use the article title rather than just page_id=3 very early on. Useful when people do link back.
p/s2: I think the watermarks are okay for the moment. Not that my opinion is very important actually :p
p/s3: Blacksoldierflyblog.com is really a blog, but I was wondering if it might be an idea to move the “Timing the transition-larva to adult black soldier fly” to it’s own separate page? I’m sure others will have more thoughts on this, but it might allow you to continue blogging about other aspects of BSF larvae without worrying about keeping that post at the top (or perhaps employ such plugins as ‘featured post’ etc?)

mosey, what you said about SEO seems to agree with what I’ve read so far. Fortunately I have a lot to post about so I’ll just get to it.

I’ll look into permalinks and also featured posts. I can also see where separate pages will come in handy for reference type information.

I sure do appreciate the feedback.

Thanks for the help so far, I have few more questions. I like the simplicity of my blog but I’m considering more features. What do you all think about my adding:

Paginated posts.

Featured post.

Lightbox 2 or similar.

Do you think the sidebar YouTube player adds or detracts?

I made a page for my videos. Can you recommend a better approach?

Video page: https://blacksoldierflyblog.com/?page_id=112

Hi all, glad I found this post,
what a fascinating site.
Very interesting read.
For nature or science fans I found it good to look at too.
Also, isn’t it great to see a blog with no ads.
I wish you luck.
mike

My tuppence on your thoughts:

If the post content is long enough to warrant pagination, then go for it ?? Personally I’m not a fan of paginated posts (since I like to read everything in one go) but it’s useful for breaking up the page or for loading on e.g. mobile devices maybe?

Featured post – Just out of interest, where would this go on the page?

I’m not very familiar with Lightbox2, but I imagine this is for a gallery of all the pictures on your site?

I think the Youtube player could sit further down in the sidebar. On the one hand it highlights extra content, but on the other hand, it depends on how many people would watch the ‘squished’ version of the video player.

Sorry if this sounds uber critical. I’m sure many others will have much better feedback.

@mikey1: I think it’s a really interesting blog too! ?? Especially now that it has even more content!

I’m glad you found the information interesting mickey1, I think it’s a good time to blog about green technologies.

mosey, I like the criticism, please keep it coming if you will. ??

My instincts told me not to paginate, but I recognize that there might be an advantage in having more post titles near the top.

The main reason I put the little YouTube player in the sidebar was to add some color and some interest to the main page. I’ll try moving it down a bit a see how it looks.

I was thinking about Lightbox or similar to allow people to see the enlarged images without leaving the blog window. Now that I think about it I’m not sure what happens if I choose “open image in new window”. I’ve been assuming that it would cause the image to open in a full size window, but if it opened a small window over the blog window I would go with that.

I don’t know where I would put a featured post. I started thinking about it because a lot of the content is reference type stuff… I may end up relying on pages quite a bit because of that.

I’m normally a wise guy, but I’m toning myself down a little because I don’t want to scare too many people off with my undiluted personality. ?? I’m fortunate because I have tons of content to post, I just wish I had more time.

Once again, thanks all for the input.

bsflarva, I started with wordpress about 2 months ago – using blog.txt. I didn’t know sqwat about html or css when I started, but I’ve had a lot of fun learning.

I have made gradual changes to the site over the last 2 months. I am pretty happy with it now. I hope I don’t keep changing it because everytime I start hacking on my theme my writing begins to suck.

Here it is:

https://www.longsufferingtrad.com