In this article I’ve decided to finally write about something that has been bothering me for quite a while now.

Take a look at any article anywhere on my blog and you’ll notice that under every single one of my posts there is a little rectangular advert that I designed about how I use the  Thesis Theme for my blog. I also mention that I am not an advanced coder. But …….

I Do Actually Understand Basic Coding

While all the claims that the Thesis Theme is easy to use (which it is) are true what I did not mention is that I do actually understand basic HTML and CSS and am able to write basic static code for websites. I wanted to make that clear, firstly because ads like this can sometimes be misleading and make it look like anyone can quickly get set up and running within days.

I did get my blog up and running within days but the learning curve was huge. I sat on my own with a fat manual, visited countless websites and joined forums to get help over a period of months to get it absolutely the way I wanted. Finally I did manage to grasp a good understanding of how to get a blog up and running very quickly. I think when people write about how easy certain things are to do what they are referring to sometimes is how easy they find it now. In other words if a complete newbie was to sit at a computer and attempt to get a blog up and running ofcourse it is going to be difficult. 

It still is not necessary to understand everything that I have managed to understand but if you want to get fussy about the exact look and feel of your blog then I would highly recommend learning Dreamweaver, Photoshop and also getting to grips with basic coding. i.e. HTML and CSS. I probably will not be going into any coding tutorials on my blog because there are so many resources out there already that are doing a much better job of it than I would if I attempted it. (as I said I’m not an advanced coder !!)

I Do Use Dreamweaver Software

There are a few tutorials on my blog about Photoshop but none about Dreamweaver because I will only ever use it to add a few codes to my blog and not use it to design big websites from scratch.

For this reason I’m unlikely to do any tutorials about it. Why? Well there are very good resources on the internet anyway so and I think it is better for me to recommend products, service or website that will help you. If I create a Dreamweaver tutorial I am going to be faced with questions about more indepth subjects related to Dreamweaver while I this should be expected anyway my intention is not to go down a road I am not 100% passionate about. With Dreamweaver I only use it for tasks that I am most likely to be carrying out for my own projects. Why am I telling you all this?

Finding Good Resources

I’m slowly gearing my blog towards providing tips, techniques and tricks that I use to create web pages, graphics and logos but more importantly the resources that will help you to get your blog or website the way you want it.

My first recommended resource, where I learnt most of my basic coding from, is a free site called http://www.w3schools.com/ although personally I’d still rather use Dreamweaver.

Moving on from my previous post from quite a while back now what I have decided to do is to add photographs, photoshopped images and graphics that I have worked on as these are the things that I enjoy doing. This will serve as my personal portfolio as well as a way for me to keep my best work online.

I think it would also be a good idea for this blog to serve as my CV or portfolio as I find the traditional method of submitting a CV extremely boring. I will be adding all this as pages to keep them separate from my posts. The pages will be as follows (i think) ‘Photographs’ divided into ‘colour’ and ‘black & white’, ‘photoshopped’ images and ‘sketches’.

Have a browse through the Colour photography page while the others are being prepared to be added. As well as the pages serving as part of my portfolio take a look at the images I have created for each blog post too. Some of them are photographs, sketches and illustrations in Photoshop.

Recently I’ve been reading quite a bit about blogging by visiting others blogs, reading ‘traditional’ books and watching related videos on youtube and other video sharing sites. I had a solid burst of six full days of reading and learning and doing things only related to blogging and am always amazed at how much can be learned in such a short space of time with focus.

Letting it slip

After my outburst of learning I stopped for about two days just to relax my mind a little but the problem was that I immediately felt as though I was letting myself slip away from blogging. It feels to me as though the time it takes to forget anything I have learned is so much shorter compared to the time it takes to learn and absorb information.

Regularly surrounding myself with the right information

I had written an article called symmetrical sense that I first wrote as part of my university dissertation and when I added it to my blog I started to doubt whether it was relevant atall to my blogging journey. In the article I discuss how exposure to natural symmetrical shapes and patterns govern our sense and perception of beauty.  I am now beginning to think that maybe it is the same for my efforts in blogging too. The moment I stop surrounding myself or mentally switch off from anything that is blog related I feel that I get completely out of touch. If you read the article I mentioned you’ll get a better sense of what I mean.

This is probably the way I need to keep on top of things. Has this ever happened to you where you think you’ve learned something but then everything is forgotton in such a short space of time?

I have just been going through my blog trying to find a certain article I wrote and it took me absolutely ages. Considering I have only been blogging for just over a month now I was expecting to have been able to find it considering I have a low number of posts so far.

Anyway I had a rough idea what I had written about so I clicked on the categories and still couldn’t find it. So there is something I need to start working on straight away. May be a search field would be good too but not sure how important that is at this stage?

A few of the categories are ok but if I cannot find my own post I dread to think how my readers will make sense of anything on my blog. I’m glad that happened because it’s a problem that I may not have noticed or even thought of looking into. I wander how many visitors have been and gone already.

I thought I’d document this incase you need to check over your blog and organise it better if you have not done it already. Is your blog easy to navigate? Is it categorised accurately?

Something just occurred to me. I have been writing several blog posts and over the space of a few months I am beginning to wander whether it is going to become increasingly difficult to avoid repeating the content in my articles.

I’ve only been doing this now for just over a month and already I feel the need to look over the whole of my blog to make sure I am not going round in circles with my posts. I think what I am going to start doing is pin pointing exactly what sparks off my blog articles because there may be certain times and circumstances when I am receptive to writing an article, i.e. being under pressure, succeeding or feeling good about something etc. This might help me to avoid repeated content.

As a blogger have you found that you have repeated your content? Or repeated the same type of message within your articles?