Blogging

Ideas for Blogging, including websites, information, and tips.

Creating a Clickable Image Map: Ideas for your Header Image

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I spent most of the typhoon day today, apart from a small outage of power in the afternoon, working on small project for one of my clients at AgentsChat.com.

agentschatclicks

If you look closely, you’ll see that the area at the top, the header image has now got clickable areas with each clickable area linked to one of the categories of forums below. While clickable areas like that is hardly new, it did occur to me that making your header image clickable might be a good way to add extra navigation to your blog, and with clickable areas and tooltips showing information about each link, you get an extra chance to reach your visitors, and direct them to different places in your blog.

How do you do it? Continue reading →

Dreamhost: A good place to start hosting

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If you have never hosted your own website’s before, it’s actually not that complicated. But still those first steps into the unknown can be actually quite tricky. I’ve been a Dreamhost customer for quite some time, 2004 in fact. During that time, I’ve had good service, lots of space to grow, and some great tools!

Of Dreamhost, Servers and Coupons for all!

As I’m happy to report that I’ve been moved to a new Virtual Server, courtesy of Dreamhost. I had been thinking about it for a while, and finally opted to go for it after the problems with the blog on a shared server. You can check out how the PS works here. Since Dreamhost is now offering only one plan, I opted for that, and decided to spend the extra money on my server. Here are my stats for the last few days, it’s fun to see how things go up and down. There’s also a reboot server button for when things get sticky! It works a treat.

dhps

I’ll be doing a full review of the service in about a couple of weeks. Suffice to say, if you’re interested, you can use my special Dreamhost Coupon. To celebrate Dreamhost’s 10th birthday, I’m offering the Triple 10 – That’s get 10% more bandwidth, 10% more space, and 10% off the price, too, on ANY plan, and that’s in addition to the discounts that Dreamhost is offering for longer term contracts.

Payment Period

Cost

Discount

Monthly

$60.90

$5.10

Yearly

$119.40

$11.94

Two years

$214.80

$21.48

Three years

$286.20

$28.62

Five years

$417.00

$41.70

Ten years

$714.00

$71.40

If you’re interested, when you sign up, you can use the DreamHost Promo Coupon Code: DH10THBIRTHDAY . And yes, pass it on!

Blog Design Update: Baby steps…

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Thanks to Michael Kwan’s review, I was able to get some excellent feedback on my overall layout of the blog, to which I’ve already left some comments!

I’d like to check back every so often, to detail my progress. He suggested the following points:

* Lose the Related Posts on the index page…. Gone.

* Too many categories… I am slowly merging and moving categories. I think I’ll target to just have 10-12 categories. 8 categories gone…

* Category names aren’t very descriptive. Merged, and added some extra text…

* The sidebar feels too busy for me. I’ve redone the blogroll, but I’m not done. It’s still a little busy. Gone is the ‘pages’ section, the links are tidied up, BlogRush also is gone. Also some of the featured links are moved around. Additional things gone, include several pages like ‘directory’ with links moved to the Blogroll, and Kiva is gone … there was so little interest in I couldn’t believe it. Gone.

* Lack of graphics. I realize that it’s an investment blog, but a few images here and there would really break up that huge body of text. … Yes, good idea. It’s actually one of the aspects I raised when doing reviews. I usually do post some pictures, but I think I need more visual aspects. Duly noted.

* Change the byline … changed.

* Hard to tell where one post ends and another begins. …I added Google Ads like before, but none of them are images, so it’s a little text heavy again.

How am I doing? Do let me know! How have you improved your blog lately? What kind of things do you change regularly?