This blog is now about one year old, give or take a day or two. I launched it just before the beginning of November last year and, as you would have expected, it has evolved in its own way and not according to plan. Particularly what hasn’t happened to plan is that I’ve not had anything like enough time to devote to getting its design to be the way that I want, although now, it is starting to come through.
There are other things. I wanted to post my whole back-catalog of writing to this blog – including all postings I made to IT-Director from about 1998 onwards. I haven’t done the whole back-catalog. I’ve done about half of the postings that still have current value. However I was never in a hurry. Building a web site is a learn-as-you-go experience and the most important thing is to take the time to observe.
I wanted to get to a reasonable level of dependable traffic within a year and I’ve done that. There’s an average of 500 page-reads per day right now and the number is gradually rising. That level of readership is good enough to ensure a reasonable Google ranking and hence a reasonable stream of Google search-related traffic.
The look and feel
It is now pretty much where I wanted to be but it needs another month-or-so’s tinkering with. I’m in the process of building two other complementary web sites and because of that I’m doing everything that I think is worth doing on HaveMacWillBlog first. I have not worried about getting advertising revenue at all in the past year. I’ve simply put Google Ads on the site and it has earned almost nothing. (About $15 per month).
However, I simply haven’t tried to drive revenue. I’ll be reasonably happy if I can pay my hosting costs from the ad revenue and if I double the ad revenue that would just about do it. I haven’t yet tried affiliate programs or Amazon links or even fully mined the Google Ads options. That’s because I’ve been following the Magazine model of a web site. Truth to tell, this isn’t really a blog it’s a kind of ezine. But as an ezine it fails dismally right now because the navigation is awful and that is something I intend to address fairly soon. You’ll notice when it changes.
I have spent an inordinate amount of time on look and feel. This is partly because I’m intrigued by web design and particularly by color and form. Color and form are the brand of a magazine or newspaper. They also should be the brand of a web site. I decided to be funky and vary colors while retaining form. One of the problems a web site faces is that it tends to look roughly the same every time – but in a boring way. I’ve tried to make the site look roughly the same every time in an interesting way.
A particular effort has been put into color matching. I started off with an original set of 11 structurally identical themes that had different color schemes. Over the months I got rid of 3 color schemes that I didn’t like and replaced them. I then used the HVC color scheme software for Photoshop to get the colors in close-to-perfect matching sets. The design of the site is now a lot cleaner.
There’s more to do and I’ll be doing some of it this weekend.
En Passant
I spent a fair amount of time trying to find sources of authentic knowledge about how web sites should be designed and built. I’m beginning to believe that there aren’t any such sources. I’m already building two other web sites using the experience gathered from HaveMacWillBlog and that fact gives me an idea for a third such site. If only there were more than 24 hours in a day.
