Blogger Burnout

Is normally caused by the author themselves when they aren’t able to control the number of posts they supply to their readers. Wait, let me try to rephrase that.

You are posting on your weblog too often!

Have you considered how often you needed to post on your weblog before even starting it? Well, I didn’t also and have noticed that my number of posts have been degrading ever since I started. I used to casually post almost 2-3 posts a day easy but realize I’m only posting 1 per day or 1 every two days. Is my life getting more boring? Maybe. But I think I’m already suffering from a slight burnout and slowly feeling the need of blogging often, disappearing.

A very good scenario of bloggers burning out can be read from Wired News: Bloggers Suffer Burnout. The scenario I’ve found only to have been proven when a weblog is at its peak and the author isn’t able to keep up with his/her readers in terms of comments. Imagine, each post generates minimum 20 comments and you need to reply to keep the communication between readers chugging along.

In the article covered by Wired News, Whiskey Bar blogger, Billmon was forced to close his comments because:

“You’ve only got so many hours in the day, and like most bloggers, I’ve got a full-time day job, and something had to give..”

Another blogger who ran Counterspin Central that was previously hosted on Blogger even closed down due to the pressure of having to fulfil his readers expectation of continuous posts.

So if you come to think of it, planning a blog actually might save you from not only being an obsessive blogger but also from being a burnt out one. My theory of this is that when someone jumps on the bandwagon without realization before or while they’re on the wagon, they would slowly become obsessive of what they’ve gained. Be it the readers or traffic or even just the feeling of being able to scream online.

Their obsessive desire would later lead them off the track and bit by bit, the blogger burnout occurs. So my fellow bloggers, what is your next plan of action right now?

The Star Online

Celebrates its 10th Anniversary with a revamp to its website. They’ve moved forward by lessening the many navigation links for a menu and kinda shorten the whole vertical scrolling effort. If you’d like to know what its previous website looked like, click HERE. Please be warned that the image size is 773 x 2076 pixels.

That aside, let’s have a look at the new layout that you can view online HERE. The redesign sports a slightly curved navigation for the top menu and a cleaned up secondary navigation bar below the banner. The navigation has been really cleaned up by employing the use of dropdown menus to each parent category. The colors used for the buttons are attractive and remains readable. Sporting a good sign for usability.

They’ve also taken away the default underlined links and made them only active when hovered. If you noticed, there isn’t anymore need for extensive vertical scrolling. The layout actually maintains its 4-column persona but has been slightly altered. Now, the main content has been placed on the left and more images are placed around creating an invisible box of focus. Next to the latest local update, more priority has been devised towards the World news too.

Two things have surprised me though. The first being the search function. It’s gone. 0.0 It used to be on the left but now its disappeared from the face of the homepage. The other thing that has gone ‘kaput!’ is The Spotlight column.

Overall, I must congratulate to a job well handled for The Star team in the redesign. They’ve definetely pulled it off by making the website even easier to navigate. However, I still feel that that are few common usability problems and should’ve stuck with the old design in some way. I’d also like to point out first that I’m comparing usability against the CNN website.

An example of better usability, the team should have stuck with the underlined links. The green headers isn’t enough to distinguish each section cause my eyes scanned text without a pause. It’s like I’m reading through a whole parargraph. What I think the team should’ve done was either used a bigger font or have a line cut below the titles of News, Business, Sports and Technology.

Why doesn’t the titles of Property, Motoring and Entertainment feel the same like the above? Well, it’s because you have more white space distinguishing each of them.

I’m not sure if anyone would think the same, but wouldn’t it be good to make the main article title clickable as well? And guess what? I found the search. It was hidden inside the website after you click into it.

These are small issues that The Star wouldn’t have a problem dealing within a week or so if they choose to alter anything. The other thing I’m just wondering now, if they had reveloped the website in full CSS, would it actually help load the website faster? Hmm..

Oh well, kudos to The Star Online team and happy celebrating to a job well done. Hope the next revamp will kick bigger ass and probably shock even CNN.

Tiara spotted a weird issue with The Star website too. When viewing with images turned off, the layout was pushed upwards.

Recommending a Freelancer

To your own client isn’t easy. Why the need to recommend? Well, I could inform the client of the busy schedule I’m currently facing and suggest a time when only I might be free in handling his/her project. However, sometimes a client needs to have a project done badly and what do you do? Well, I won’t take on more than I can chew because it’ll be an empty promise to a client later.

So the only other option I have is recommend another freelancer to the client. But wait, it isn’t just as easy as passing the project on to your next best friend. To me, the next person I pass the project needs to be someone who understands the handling of themselves and a client. Having a client suffer a bad experience not only will leave your reputation in jeapordy but it would also leave a mark on the freelancer too. However, if the client is happy with the job then he/she will either approach the other freelancer or me again.

How should a freelancer handle themselves?
Well, other than being confident of themselves, I think freelancers need to be more honest and more explanatory in projects. I also feel they shouldn’t just quote the price per page without first evaluating the amount of work needed to be done on a project. I think this is fair in concern when a client only wants a project like a 5-page HTML website developed without any necessary additions of Flash or other functions. Freelancers also need to not be intimidated by the client all the time in lowering the price. Reason for this is because even before I pass on the project, I’ll try informing the freelancer of the client’s rough budget.

How should a freelancer handle the client?
I can’t really answer that question because every freelancer has their own methods of working. However, I feel all freelancers need to maintain good communication with clients in emails and during changes in the project. If you can’t perform a certain task, be honest and don’t lie to the client. Another important skill freelancers need is people skills. Isn’t it the same as good communication? Well, not entirely because to me, people skills are used more when negotiating with clients and maintaining that good communication.

I won’t blame those who think otherwise of my ideologies. These are just some of the processes and working methods I believe would work with freelancers and clients. All this I’ve learned and picked up by myself ever since taking more interest in the business side of things.

Because a reminder to all freelancers, you are the project manager, the marketing person and the designer/developer. Just because you only design/program, it doesn’t mean you aren’t involve with each other. Hence, that’s another article I might blog about later. Cheers.

Freelancers Should Be Blogging

And Peter Flaschner at Almost Cool tells us why? HERE. The article is from the series he’s currently writing, “Who Should Be Blogging?”. He’s already spoken about used car dealers, realtors and with the latest addition, freelancers.

A summary of reasons from Peter’s article?

• Network Growth
• Powerful Liaisons
• Client(s) Stumbling
• Archive of Brilliance
• Your Specialization

Why do I think a freelancer should blog?
If you’re true and true right to your heart, your passion writes for you. If you’re pure and pure of mind, your posts point towards righteousness. If you’re open and open of heart and mind, you’ll understand that freelancing isn’t only about freedom, it’s about the confidence you have in yourself and not fearing acknowledging that you’re forever learning. You are professional, you are humble, you are a person who thinks the world is neither round or square because your posts will reflect the person with a passion to absorb his/her surrounding.

And it’s time to let the cat out of the bag for readers who are here now. My next website revamp is going to be pretty big. (to me..) It’s going to be a portfolio with a blog that I’ll try to cover every aspect of the web design industry. It’s content would be broken into various categories such as web design & usability, technology, marketing, managing and employment. All this will be finalized upon the final launch later, which I aim to be by 2006.

So my friends, this website will no longer be a space of rants and rambling. It would be a place of knowledge that I hope to share with everyone as I age and experience through my career as a freelancer. I want to share the tears, the joy and the truth of this business.

Oh, don’t worry. I’m still going to have a place for my rants and ramblings. Just that it’ll be in a more subtle method with some visual stimulant.

I hope everyone will stick around with me till then. Cheers.

Comments VS Shoutbox

I’ve noticed that I’ve implemented both without really thinking of what works best for my website. Since there’s going to be a huge revamp up by next year, I suppose it’s fair to blog about it now and gain some views on this. I’ll try talking about the differences of each before coming to my own conclusion on what might work for me.

A comments system is already integrated into the MovableType(MT) publishing engine. However, since I started blogging back in LICT which was probably around year 2002, I remember there wasn’t a single comment. Might’ve been the content was purely boring and might’ve been the website didn’t have enough traffic. Then when I redesigned it, I also implemented a shoutbox which was made by my friend Snecx. Soon I started getting feedback from people or even spammers and haters or trolls as some might refer.

So, why are visitors leaving feedback on the shoutbox and rarely using the comment system of the blog? Let’s analyze everything we can about the shoutbox.

Continue reading Comments VS Shoutbox