miplacenictspace
How might creating my own Personal Learning Network make a difference in my life and in the lives of others?
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Feedjit
Day 2 Task: Run a First Time Audit
Yipee! Schools out and I’m on holiday at the moment so with our 2 teenagers having fled the coop this afternoon, my husband (with some gentle coaxing) kindly offered to give me audit feedback .
He is a ‘new kid on the block’ when it comes to IT so apart from coming to grips with manouvering the mouse hubby actually spent time reading my blog rather than looking at the sidebars – 10 points! As a Painter Decorator hubby was drawn to the bling (widgets) that provided colour to the page but opted not to read the information.
After reading more than one post, he assumed my blog was about communicating with people on the same wave length and thought that the writing font could have been larger. His lasting impression – my blog is about connecting and networking with like-minded people – fun-tastic!
I have also left requests for a quick audit from 2 professional/technical bloggers of which I may post at a later date. Now onto.. day 3 task:)
4 Responses to “Day 2 Task: Run a First Time Audit”
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Cluster Map
January 15th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
It’s interesting watching a husband reviewing a blog as they look for different things. My hubby a painter and decorator by trade but works in the building industry.
One of the challenges on a blog can be balancing widgets and colors because it can detract from people reading what you want them to read.
January 18th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
16/01 Anne’s Response
This is a professional looking, busy blog with lots to look at on initial entry – A blogger who has a great grasp of using widgets and has used them to give a good impression when first finding this blog. (It took me months to get the ‘hang’ of these)
I honestly felt I was looking at a blog that had been in action for a long time, but when I looked further, there were only a couple of posts. I liked the look of it, and wanted to spend time looking at the site. There was a variety of fonts, colours, widgets etc I spent quite a bit of time looking at all the widgets – memberships etc. I liked the voki and wordle addition on the sidebar. There were hyperlinks to take me to other sites etc.
Yes, it is easy to read/navigate and understand. However, I have made a comment further down about font colour and hyperlinks.
Felt like an interesting place to be and explore further.
To improve your blog:- Just to take care with the font colours Ö . When I see a blue font I assume they are a hyperlink and my first reaction is to click on it to see where it will take me Ö .
I would not use double underlines (or does your theme make hyperlinks double underlines?) or single underlines for the very same reason ( these are adds ) .
I would rename the ‘tour of duty’ page, ‘about me’ ( separate page now completed )as it is simpler (or add another page with this as a heading), describing your background.
Put the meta at the bottom of the sidebar as it is only useful to the blogger rather than the readerÖ . I would push the clustr map up higher as it is a great motivator and shows that you already have an audience Ö . Put your badge up top and add pages to the widgets (or is that what yours ndoes. It is good when pages are tabs across the top of the page.)
There is a problem with adding comments to your blog. It comes up with an error 404 message for me as well. Do you know what the cause of that is? ( Sue mentions it may be linked to copying and pasting directly from Word ) You might need to login and goto your comments and see what restrictions are on them Ö
Some further questions:- Have you been a teacher before and if so what classes have you taught? Are you a subject specialist before taking this on? Where else have you worked? ( Answers are written in my About Page ).
Thank you so very much Sue for these valued comments
January 18th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
16/01 Anne’s Response
This is a professional looking, busy blog with lots to look at on initial entry – A blogger who has a great grasp of using widgets and has used them to give a good impression when first finding this blog. (It took me months to get the ‘hang’ of these)
I honestly felt I was looking at a blog that had been in action for a long time, but when I looked further, there were only a couple of posts. I liked the look of it, and wanted to spend time looking at the site. There was a variety of fonts, colours, widgets etc I spent quite a bit of time looking at all the widgets – memberships etc. I liked the voki and wordle addition on the sidebar. There were hyperlinks to take me to other sites etc.
Yes, it is easy to read/navigate and understand. However, I have made a comment further down about font colour and hyperlinks.
Felt like an interesting place to be and explore further.
To improve your blog:- Just to take care with the font colours Ö . When I see a blue font I assume they are a hyperlink and my first reaction is to click on it to see where it will take me Ö .
I would not use double underlines (or does your theme make hyperlinks double underlines?) or single underlines for the very same reason ( these are adds ) .
I would rename the ‘tour of duty’ page, ‘about me’ ( separate page now completed )as it is simpler (or add another page with this as a heading), describing your background.
Put the meta at the bottom of the sidebar as it is only useful to the blogger rather than the readerÖ . I would push the clustr map up higher as it is a great motivator and shows that you already have an audience Ö . Put your badge up top and add pages to the widgets (or is that what yours ndoes. It is good when pages are tabs across the top of the page.)
There is a problem with adding comments to your blog. It comes up with an error 404 message for me as well. Do you know what the cause of that is? ( Sue mentions it may be linked to copying and pasting directly from Word ) You might need to login and goto your comments and see what restrictions are on them Ö
Some further questions:- Have you been a teacher before and if so what classes have you taught? Are you a subject specialist before taking this on? Where else have you worked? ( Answers are written in my About Page ).
19/01 Laura’s Response
The design is busy, colourful, interesting and tempts further exploration. I like the widgets and the badge is a great idea (have not seen that before)
What I remembered 10 minutes later:
The clever and full use of widgets and the fact that I thought it was an established blog, only to find there were only two posts. The formatting and insertion of a table.
Enjoy the brightness you’ve brought to your blog – but some of the bright text could be confused as hyperlinks to other sites and pagesÖ (I am working on this ) Some Wordpress themes have hyperlinks underlined which may help. (Am not sure how much you can tweak the CSS which controls the formating and style of links and text or not on edublogs to enable this!
At first thought oh no, animated images, but when reading and seeing the joy of colour and enthusiam in your writing thes actually weren’t too bad at all! Have come back to your blog several times over the last few days and they are fun and lively!
There are lots of resources out there that can help brighten up blog posts for images and clipart that work well. One I like but not got round to using as yet is this – http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr where you can search for a color in flickr images which are licensed to be used anywhere as long as you give the original photographer credit! Fab resource if you enjoy colours!!!
Oh and talking about making flickr fun, but not really to do with the blog – you must see this – http://www.biscuit-tin.com/ put in your or someones user name – great fun! (really not blog related,
but enjoy doing this when have a spare 5 minutes or need some creative inspiration!)
Some of the content is linked with pop-up adverts – are these really needed?Ö (Part of having an edublog page- have to become a funding supporter to have advertising removed ) It can be distracting to many readers. Some of the posts have different font formats to others, presuming these have been pasted from Word or similar… take care when doing this, always best do post into ‘html’ rather than the ‘visual’ tab in the Wordpress editor then use the wordpressbuttons above the text area to do the formatting there. Keepsyour blog look more uniformed.
Widgets – the theme you use (which I love this theme – see next notes below!) has very narrow sidebars which don’t lend themselves to the widgets embedded in your sidebars. Sometimes you can tweakthe theme to enable wider sidebars (I don’t know your theme in detail!) or in the sites where you get your widgets you can request narrower widgetsÖ (Work to look forward to Day 10 ).
As mentioned before not sure how edublogs works, but what could help is using a theme with the post contents on the left either one wider sidebar on the right, or one with two medium sidebars on the right to help keep the readers focus on the content rather than inbetween the widgets. I feel this could
balance your content out really well. There’s nothing I really dislike on your site at all, its just possibly the content needs more priority, a different theme could help balance that! You could possibly streamline the widgets to having a few less and possibly put some of them in another page itself (ie about me or a new one, where i am elsewhere etc) but your widgets are part of your online presence in other places too. Possibly some reodering of what should be seen first may help.
Back to the theme. I really like the theme, hadn’t seen this one before. Uses good font sizes and is easy to read! Only one bit that isn’t clear to see is the title of your blog and the strapline next to itÖ . The strapline is really useful for new readers to see easily what the blog is about and if they spend time looking at more on your site. The text is really small and would be better if could be bright white and a little bigger too.
The About me page – nice informal and friendly, although could be worth a couple of sentences first off summarizing who you are and what you do (very much like the text in your pink widget in the right sidebar) so new readers instantly know who you are and what you are writing about.
Overall, I’m enjoying reading your blog! Look forward to seeing how you get on with the rest of the challenge too!
Thank you so very much Sue and Laura for these valued comments
January 19th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Hi Jeanette,
I have to agree with a previous comment in that I thought your blog looked like it was well established. I find it easy to read – the font is nice and clear – and is clear as to what it is about/for.
The only thing that distracts my reading are the animated gifs – it could just be me, as I’m easily distracted!!
You’re a few days ahead of me and I can clearly see youa re enjoying and getting a lot out of the challenge.
Good luck for the next 20 days.