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Freshening this site

I’m purchasing upgrades for the software for this site – a good time to freshen up the site.

What ideas do you have for possible improvements?

The basic “structure” and approach of this site will remain.
I think I might put the whole site to fixed width – the blog part is 950 I think. Does that work for you – I’d fix it all at that width maybe.
Currently it’s not clear quickly enough when you get to the home page, that a lot of the action on this site is on the blog. That needs to be clearer.
I think I might change the header.
I’m OK about the basic colour scheme.

What else?….

ps. any changes are not going to happen overnight 🙂

pps. In the Southern Hemisphere, and certainly in Aotearoa-New Zealand, this is our go-slow time… So – sometimes your comments may take longer than usual to get through moderation…

Update: Thanks so much for all the help and suggestions on facebook, twitter, by email, and in comments. I’ve got the latest blog post titles showing on the home page now, every blog post has an invitation to share it, and you can now subscribe to the comments of each post. I’ve purchased upgrades of the software that I use, and there’s other “under the hood” improvements that should improve things also. I’m particularly grateful for the reminders that it’s the content that is primarily significant – and that the site doesn’t need major redesigning.

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12 thoughts on “Freshening this site”

  1. I’d appreciate the full text of posts showing in my RSS feed instead of the first 150 or so characters as is now. I think it would be a good idea to visually separate the blog from the other pages you have listed on the left since yes, most of the action happens here.

    1. Can you expand a bit on your “visually separate the blog from the other pages you have listed on the left”, Elle? My idea is to have the blog feature more prominently on the home page – I’d quite like it if the “Recent” post titles showed up on the home page – I’m not even sure if that’s possible. I’m on a learning curve, of course. Today I changed one small thing and suddenly found a completely different looking site – some may have noticed for an hour or two LOL!

  2. Personally I think your blog is brilliant, and I would advise you to mave very carefully, on the basis of “if it ain’t broke…”

  3. Bosco, you can set your homepage to display the blog. In your WordPress dashboard under “Reading Settings” tick “Your latest posts” next to “Front page displays.”

    I 2nd removing the preview from the RSS feed. That setting is also on Reading Settings page, choose instead “For each article in a feed show…full text.”

    You might want to consider either a plugin for folks to subscribe to comments so people can come back and reply to questions or continue the conversation; or perhaps a third-party comment management with this feature like IntenseDebate.

    As always, content is the most important part of a blog and yours is great!

    Happy upgrading!

    1. Joel, thanks for your help. I construct my site in two “bits” – http://www.liturgy.co.nz is created in Rapidweaver and is just a regular site. http://www.liturgy.co.nz/blog is a WordPress blog. I’m pleased that it works pretty seamlessly & that’s the result of much effort. Now I want to put the list of the most recent posts on the home page http://www.liturgy.co.nz – your instructions do something else. Your other points are really important – I thought I already had a comments feed. Anyone know a good plugin?

      Thanks, Ed, for your comment – and, yes, you may see very little change – but just a bit better 🙂

  4. I assume you want the recent posts feature on the blog pages to appear on your home page.

    How do yo add this, its a wordpress widget I assume.

    It almost certainly uses PHP to read RSS feed and format it to HTML you see displayed. I’m fairly sure wordpress is PHP based

    If you have the raw PHP code for this wigit you could integrate this into the home page which would then have to become a PHP
    file rather than an HTML one.

    Else you are probably faced writing the PHP to do it – its not a complex task if you know PHP and HTML, daunting if you don’t.

  5. I think it looks OK as is, but do what makes you happy! Your blog is one of the few blogs Down Under that I follow with great interest. Keep up the good work!

    Kurt Hill
    In snowy Brooklyn, NY

    1. Thanks for that encouragement, Kurt. Because I’ve had to research and decide on each change, it took a couple of days. I think the improvements will especially help new visitors – those a regular part of this community here already mostly know what is here and where to look. Blessings.

  6. What I mean is to have the blog be the main page and the others be secondary pages (kind of like what I have on my site and others have on theirs) or failing that, make the link to the blog be more visually distinct from the others so it draws more attention.

    1. Yes, Elle, perhaps if I was starting again, or if the internet had been more like it is now when this site began, the blog might have been the front page. In any event you can think of the blog as the front page for you 🙂 But this site has a history now where around say seven thousand people will find and read a specific blog post and in most English-speaking countries this site comes at or near the top for a search for “liturgy”. To start again from scratch would break all that. I like what you have done with your site (but it doesn’t have thousands of pages that people are accessing all the time). I’m not sure what you mean about having the link “draw more attention” – once people are here they are here. I certainly appreciate that people like you have a link from your site to mine. Thanks & blessings.

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