Is It a Blog? a Website?

No, it’s a weblog! Confused yet?

Well, don’t be embarassed by it because a study by Shel Holtz at WebProNews.com shines some light to the agenda, Blog Design An Obstacle To Acceptance. His study was about the usability of blogs. Not only in terms of design but the overall view of it. The study was conducted by enlisting few users who are web-savvy but didn’t know much about blogs.

A clear example of how even a web-savvy person might not be as knowledgeable as the blogger was proven when Shel said;

Most didn’t know they were looking at a blog at all and were surprised and confused when told they were.

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Web Designers Commandment

There are actually more than ten commandments to good web design but I only want to speak about one of it. This commandment is dubbed;

Thou shall NOT kill thy website with ads.

I wonder who’s doing this right now?

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Custom Templates vs Template Providers

I’m very sure all of you know what are templates or sometimes refer to as skins or the normal term; design. With that said, how many of you have seen websites with the same design used? Plagiarism or copycat? Well, though that might be true but some are free or commercial templates sold by template providers. One of the more known providers is TemplateMonster.

Housing more than a thousand templates selling at an average price and a unique price. Difference?

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Niche Market

When a niche isn’t a niche anymore than what do you do? When you thought what was a niche market, catches up with you and make you obsolete, what do you do? Do you start a new niche? Or continue to work on your niche but offer something more than the competition?

I’m not sure if everyone knows or does this, but before you start a blog, one of the steps in the plan is finding a niche market. A subject that’s rather rare but has a very high keyword value I’d say. I’ve noticed new blogs being pinged to PPS like never before and I’ve also noticed a certain market that’s being populated ever more. Have you ever noticed that there are more new technology genre type blogs being started by a Malaysian?

As far as I know, LiewCF.com was one of the first to start a Malaysian technology blog and then there was KahSoon then SapiensBryan and now ever more, I’ve seen others like IdealGadget, Geek In Me, AllGadget..etc.

If you ask me, technology blogs are getting pretty stale and these bloggers are challenging each other head on. Not to mention I’ve not even compared these blogs to the few thousand other tech blogs outside of Malaysia. Most of these blogs offer pretty much the same but some still remain a visitor’s favorite for certain reasons.

When selecting a niche, it really depends how you manage to narrow down the subject for your blog. Take tech blogs as an example, technology has a mass the size of a whale when you want to talk about new gadgets. There’s the computer, the mobile phone, the cars, the artificial intelligence..and more. Now, if every blogger were to blog about the general subject of technology, you’ll end up with a scenario I’m discussing now.

How do you curb this or try to be better than the rest? You could either start slowly introducing your blog as a technology blog with more focus on a certain subject, or offer something that these blogs don’t have; a function, a tool or even a contest. It’s a really huge challenge if you try to overpower ones blog.

Therefore my friends, before you start blogging seriously, have ascertain something that would make your visitors coming back for more. Blogs that are of personal rants, ramblings, debates, views wouldn’t have to worry much of a niche market because everyone’s life is unique in their own manner.

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.

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