Are you looking for a little help with your blog? You may want to check out Vandelay Website Design Blog. This blog is the blog component of a web design business called Vandelay Website Design. The company itself services both small and medium sized businesses by developing user-focused websites that are both attractive and functional. They use valid XHTML and CSS coding with their designs making them accessible to a wider range of users. You will find a link to their homepage on the blog if you are interested, but if you just want to learn how to use and market your blog more effectively, you will find any of the recent bloggeries very informative: 10 Tips for Making Your Blog Posts More del.icio.us, 101 Ways to Monetize your Website or Blog, User’s Guide to Google Webmaster Tools, Weekly Links, Getting the Most out of your FAQ Page, 10 Ways to Design for Impatient Visitors, A Guide to Promoting Your Blog Through Guest Posts, Weekly Links, 30 Keyword Tools to Use for Your Website, and July in Review. If you take a look through the business aspect of Vandelay’s Design portfolio and the services they offer, you will see that they know not only how to create effective websites, but how to market them as well. This alone gives credibility to the blog as far as the usefulness of the information provided.
Navigation on this blog is very simple and user friendly. Bloggeries are left marginalized with black text on white background and a light grey border around the page. The header contains an attractive business sense appeal in gun metal and light blue colors. The right navigation system contains subscription methods for the blog, a menu for top commenters listed by name as well as how often they have commented, a most popular posts menu, and a categories menu. In the categories you will find a wealth of information for blog assistance – blog promotion, blogging, CSS, design, hosting, links, marketing, and more. The most popular posts on the blog include bloggeries such as 10 Keys to Effective Writing for the Web, Customize your Own WordPress Theme, 83 Top Webmaster Resources, What Makes a Website Search Engine Friendly, 26 Steps to Successful Blogging, and Find the Perfect Colors for your Website. And as if that wasn’t enough, you can find more about Vandelay Website Design in a very handy top navigation bar that contains the Home, About Page, Services link, Portfolio, Resources, and a link directly to the blog.
This blog is getting a 4.8 from me, there is little I can offer for improvement, and more that I take away from it as valuable information for myself. The blog is aesthetically appealing with unique content. The only real suggestion I have is to make the header more dynamic and attention grabbing because at the moment it’s not at par with the content and it’s a shame if someone were to visit and not spend the time to read through all the quality content the author has produced. While the niche itself does not stand out in the crowd, the content definitely does. I like the connection the blog has with its readership by making note of the commenters and by highlighting popular posts. You can see this strategy is working very well for the blog as in July they saw 26,458 visitors and 45,896 pageviews. The blog does not contain advertising, and on the main page there are no pictures with the bloggeries, but if you click on the header for each post you will find relevant pictures posted with each bloggerie. Also, I find the use of social networking somewhat of a nuisance on many blogs, however this blog has made very effective use of social networking tools and incorporated them very effectively into the blog. Overall this blog has a lot to offer and I would highly recommend it to anyone starting out with blogging that may have questions, or to anyone that is wanting to make some tweaks to their current blog to make it more marketable and more effective. Great job Vandelay, and thank you for the resource!
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– Chrissie
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