I always feel awkward doing these announcement posts where I’m pretty much just posting to say “Hey! Look at my site! It looks different! Isn’t that awesome?” because to be honest… It’s kinda lame.
So… now that I’ve got your attention…
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Hipstercrite had this great entry last week called How To Gain Blog Followers The Fast Way which I found myself nodding along to so vigorously that I think it stopped being a nod and started being something more of a headbanging motion that required playing some Black Sabbath to get out of my system.
In the post she writes:
The biggest thing I’ve learned is that if you want a lot of followers and want to attract advertisers you need to make your blog niche. The more niche the better.
I’d be lying if I said I don’t give a shit about my traffic (most people are lying if they say they don’t care), but I don’t give a crap enough to completely change my blog in hopes of wooing advertisers. Hey, it would be nice to get paid for this thing, but in the long run, I obviously like having my content all over the place. I have the freedom to write whatever I want.
High five! Right on, sister!
Fifteen years under my belt, and I still run my blog on the same philosophy that I always have. I will write whatever I want, whenever I want, and I don’t give a flying rat ass what anyone thinks about it. If you think I’m interesting, you’ll bear with me while I work it out.
AKA I know about half of my readership comes from real life friends who will not give two shits about this post because I’m rambling on about this mythical community that we call the blogosphere… AGAIN. Even though this largely doesn’t apply to them.
I can’t even imagine being a niche blogger. I’d run out of shit to say if I had to post solely on one topic… I tried to start a music blog once (and if you know me, you know I’m pretty fanatical about music) and I quite literally bored myself to tears within two weeks. It wasn’t fun. AT ALL.
I follow a lot of blogs that would be considered niche… Largely because there’s little other choice these days, you just follow and hope someone posts something more interesting than what they wore today or the color of their fingernail polish….
Most of the blogs I seem to be on fall into one of several categories:
1. DIY bloggers with an Etsy store. These folks post tutorials of how to do shit and try to sell you the stuff they’re making. They’re not a bad niche to follow if you like to make stuff… Except for the fact they have a tendency to make themselves look like they fell out of a magazine, and if they have nothing better to post about they just start posting things that they thought were pretty on Pinterest instead of taking a day off. Oh yeah, and they do a lot of giveaways… Usually of other ladies who sell things on Etsy… and well, some of them go a little bit overboard with it.
2. Web designers who make blog layouts for other bloggers. These are the ones that are after my true heart because truth be told they’re the ones who are most like me… Sure, I’m a web developer / themer person for an entirely different type of client. They can usually do no wrong in my book. Too bad I can only find like three of them.
3. Fashion and thrifting blogs. I always end up following these bloggers by accident. Or because I followed a link from somewhere else and decided to follow them because they had a giveaway for some killer shoes and nowadays you need to follow people to get in their little giveaway things. But for the most part? Boring. Boring. Boring. I rarely ever shop and I wear t-shirts that I got for free at tech conferences. I am so not the target demographic. They just seem to get mixed in with those DIY bloggers with Etsy stores a lot (in fact some of them straddle the two genres).
4. Living with intention / life coaching blogs. I like these bloggers a lot, except for the fact that I usually like them too much and then feel bad because I totally wish I could take their class or buy their program or whatever… but I’m just too freaking broke. But they totally give me the feel goods most of the time.
5. Mommy bloggers. I’m seriously of the mind that mommy blogger isn’t a niche, it’s just personal bloggers that have been rebranded after they pushed out some crotchfruit. The trouble with them is every other blogging community targeted at women is specifically for them and if you’re not looking to become pregnant like now…. You’re not going to have that much in common unless they’re really good storytellers.
There are days where I feel a little bit bad because I’m not any of those things… and I don’t think it’s really fair that someone who posts fifty billion pictures of shoes and has a giveaway every other day has a ton of followers because their content is bawhoring…. and then I’m all… “WHY SHOULD I FEEL BAD? I LIKE MY BLOG, GODDAMNIT!”
I suppose at the end of the day, that makes everything okay.
As I told you a few days ago, I’ve been busy as a bee working on my brand new tried and true baby blue blog layout (Sorry, I got caught up in the rhyming for a minute there). I am so happy with the way it came out and completely stunned that it didn’t take me half as long to do it as I expected. I swear, I should start a business making layouts for all of you because man… After theming massive corporate websites for a living, this totally meshes with my ADHD! (I wonder if anyone would be interested in that sort of service… Hmm… Thoughts to ponder.)
So, I guess there are a few new things that I ought to point out about the new digs…
The link that says shop up in the navigation links. That’s my especially curated for you Amazon shop! It’s full of all sorts of music I love to listen to, books I love, and movies and television I love. You ought to go buy some cool stuff that I have loved that you will love, too. Also, expect more posts about what I’ve added to the shop as I’ve added it (or not… You never know when I’m going to be lazy liar about what I say I’m going to post about.
The link that says sponsorship. Yep. I *totally* want to be one of those people who has all of those cute little buttons to other people’s blogs and shops. Spots are available for $5 for a 250×100 spot and a $3 for a 125×125 spot. I’m currently offering coupon codes for anyone who would like to swap! And honestly, I’d rather swap than have the money, so if you want to do that you should totally hit up my contact form or leave a comment on this post. Or if you want to trade a guest post with each other, that could be really awesome too.
All of the links in the sidebar that have to do with social networking sites and other places to follow this here blog. Those things are fun and you should TOTALLY go follow me on them if you aren’t already, because you KNOW you can’t get enough of me because I’m that totally awesome. Or something like that.
In conclusion, if you find any glaring errors in this brand new blog layout of mine, don’t hesitate to let me know… because to be quite honest, I didn’t check it out in Internet Explorer.
When I was in high school and college, I used to change up my blog designs quite frequently. I wasn’t as prolific as some of the other people I followed, but when I felt things were getting stale stylistically (probably somewhere every 2-4 months), I wouldn’t hesitate to head into Photoshop and the stylesheets and switch things up. I was happy to do it. I was excited to do it. It might have taken me a day or two to figure out what I wanted… and there were definitely times I felt like I was butting heads with my vision versus my Photoshop skills but I largely proceeded without fear.
I didn’t know to be afraid in those days. I was just doing what felt like fun.
Then, I graduated from college and became a real paid for my skills web developer and everything changed.
Suddenly, my life went from messing around with Photoshop and CSS to make my blog look pretty to using Photoshop to slice up someone else’s design and using CSS to replicate what was in the picture, usually resulting in a fight with a designer somewhere down the line because something was 1px off or I eyedroppered the wrong shade of blue out of the Photoshop file because no one gave me a colorsheet to work from.
I was working on teams to build small to mid sized websites using Drupal. Things were constantly about collaborating with others to get the job done. My life became about best practices and standards. Everything was always about doing things the right way over the easy way.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing… because it isn’t. It’s the way things have to be to have a large web project run smoothly. However, it had a rather grim downside for me.
Fear and complacency.
It wasn’t very long after I went professional that my blog began to suffer. It was no longer fun to retheme my blog, instead it was a terrifying proposition. My job involved implementing designs that other people made. I had quickly become used to the fact that I was relying on others for the blueprint of everything I did… I’d open Photoshop and sigh and say to myself, “I’m not a real designer,” and then I’d give up.
As if it somehow mattered if I was a “real” designer or not when it came to my blog.
I considered hiring the job out to someone else, but couldn’t bring myself to do it for something that I essentially knew how to do myself… even if I found myself believing that I wasn’t all that capable.
I bring it up because I’ve been unhappy with my current theme for quite some time. While I love how it reflects my New Yorkerness, I’ve been not loving the color scheme so much. It’s so drab. I dread the moments where I have to actually go and look at it.
I’ve been sitting with Photoshop open on my machine for the greater part of the week… Largely feeling at a loss about what to do about my “I hate how my blog looks” predicament. I vented to longtime blogger friend, Aubrey who commiserated with me on the whole feeling fearful and inadequate in regards to design skills and we reminisced about the time when we didn’t care, we just did.
And now… We just spend our overthinking it instead of just doing it.
Which leads me to yesterday evening, with the goal of creating a new layout in my head… I found myself browsing through fonts on the web looking for some inspiration. I downloaded and installed a bunch of new ones, and all of the sudden… The look I wanted came together. No overthinking. Just playing around and seeing where it went… and I think it went somewhere good.
I went to bed this morning with a mockup in hand and a plan… and I couldn’t be happier.
The new theme will probably be up by the end of the week, if not before…. Be on the lookout for it!
You know what looks really neat? Having pretty buttons that link to other people’s blogs in your sidebar. Therefore, I am putting the call out to all you lovely ladies and gents who have blogs, stores, small businesses, etc. If you’d like to swap buttons with me for the month of April, leave me a comment on this post and/or a message using my handy-dandy contact form to express your interest so we can discuss the details! Yay!
In exchange for putting my button on your sidebar you get:
- A space for a 125px by 125px button at the top of my sidebar for the month of April.
- An introduction in a post about all of the wonderful people who are swapping buttons with me that will go live sometime mid-month.
- The opportunity to do a guest post if you so wish sometime in the month of April.
Sounds like fun, no? Looking forward to hearing from you!
As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now (or perhaps you haven’t if you’re reading this by feed reader), I created a new theme for the blog. I wanted something recognizably New York-y, and I figured a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge looking back toward Manhattan taken from Brooklyn Bridge Park. Probably one of the more stunning photos I’ve taken.
The font is IM Fell Great Primer which can be found on Google Fonts. Hat tip to Ryan from This Must Be The Place, it’s the same font that she uses on her blog and I just fell in love with it and had to have.