I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Blogger.com has upgraded its offer of free blogging sites. Granted it’s still at the beta mode, but the results of the additional flexibility as regards the ability to change fonts and layout, to add elements including photos, and instituting numbering for posts all add up to a rather professional-looking blog page, I would say.
Contrast for yourself: this page, announcing the graceful pro, and the mirror page, the rather studious amateur, though not for the lack of trying. Granted that the content is important and it’s what sustains the success of a blog, one cannot downplay the significance of the attention grabber in the form of an appealing page layout.
This is really Advertising 101 where packaging comes first. In this age of instant gratification, the visitors must get the feel that they are treated to a visual magnificence such that they would make a split decision to linger on, thinking to themselves, “hey, this guy/gal is taking such trouble to lighten up his/her blog, maybe he/she does have something interesting to tell as well. Let’s give him/her the benefit of the doubt”.
To put in perspective, there are literally thousands, no, millions of bloggers out there, each spewing out their own rendition of cyber-columns on a regular basis. Yet there are only so many seconds in a day, and a big chunk of that is spent on making a real living. So realistically, one can only read about 3-5 blogs at any given time (I’m generalizing from my own blog reading capacity), which means there is a ring of truth to what was purportedly said by the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, "The average blog has one reader: the blogger".
Remember that famous prediction in 1943 by Thomas Watson, the former chairman of IBM, that there was a world market for, maybe at most, five computers? But look around you today, what do you see? I rest my case.
So on the tiniest likelihood that Mr. Schmidt too could err due to a momentary lapse of sanity (isn’t that what attending UC Berkeley would do to you as I have been told to have happened to me, in no uncertain term?), I’ll persevere so that I would not miss out the day when, say, more than five people, read my blog on a daily basis.
So, Blogger.com, let’s bring on the gamma and the other string of Greek letters all the way to zeta.
2 comments:
The design is pleasing my eyes, the flower is calming my mind (my BlogFeast is still down at this moment, for a record of 10 continuous hours).
Yes, you have only one chance to leave a positive impression, design is the first thing a visitor sees. Then it is content, and yours are fantastic!
To make for easy tracking, I use RSS reader (google reader is good) to help me read about 15 blogs a day. I keep track matters from ajax to SEO (everything about building a successful online appearance).
Technorati.com is now tracking over 58 million blogs. From one report I read and forgotten about the source, it said 1 blog was established every second.
You may want to use Google Analytics to track your blog's traffic. It is exciting to see traffic climbing.
And yes, Blogger Beta is so much better than Blogger itself. Kudos to Google.
Keng Hui
Glad you like the flower sketch, and even happier for its soothing effect on you.
Hope by now you've got your BlogFeast back up. You can never be too careful with protecting your turf. Hope you emerge wiser.
Thanks for the tracking tips.
Wow, one blog per second. That's 86,400 blogs a day, which means by now more than a million blogs have appeared after my debut.
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