Our First Month - A Look Back
March 31, 2007 | Comments (9) | Filed under: General
As we close in on the last few days of the month of March, I wanted to do a quick retrospective post about our site and where it’s headed.
The first thing I would love to do is ask for some feedback from our readers. There are many of you who have continued to visit our site and taken the time to contribute comments to our posts, and for that I am very thankful. You guys are what makes doing this site worthwhile. With that said, I would LOVE to hear from you on what you think of the site. Be brutally honest, I can take it, anything goes. If you love/hate our layout or think my posts are great/stupid let me know. The only way we can improve on things is by hearing about what we can do better…
EDIT: The responses to this have been great so far. I’ve already taken the advice of two readers who complained about the number of ads on the site. I removed two different ad-blocks, so hopefully the site is a little cleaner for our usual visitors.
I’ve decided to take the site in a slightly different direction for next month and most likely the months that follow. Professionally, I’ve been a software engineer for over 7 years and have been working on the web for all 7. My background and my expertise comes from this experience. The posts I’ve made over the last month have been sort of split down the middle. On one side, I’ve talked a lot about blogging, tools for blogging, and marketing your new site, since I’ve had to do a lot of this myself. On the other side, I’ve talked at length about programming your site and ways you can tweak it.
There are so many great sites out there with such a wealth of knowledge on blogging, it seems like I’m just reiterating points that have been made already when it comes to this area. Bookmark Bliss has the tagline, “Improve your Online Business” and I plan to focus the majority of my efforts in this area, from an implementation standpoint that is in line with my experiences. While the blogging tips won’t disappear, you may see less of them. No guarantees though 
What this means is expect a lot more effort put into relating my posts to real world experiences from my career, as well as new experiences I deal with every day. Many of the issues and techniques we use every day can really help you improve your business, I hope that by focusing on this area it will make Bookmark Bliss much more unique and informative and allow us to build a community of like minded entrepreneurs. My goal is to provide tools, ideas, reviews, and information that you can use immediately to improve your own business.
Ultimately, we would love to hear some feedback from our readers as well when it comes to the topic area of the site. What would you like to see more/less of on our site? What brings you back now?
I’ve learned a lot of absolutely invaluable lessons this month when it comes to Blogging. Bookmark Bliss is my first real attempt at both running and maintaining an actively updated blog, so it’s a learning experience to say the least. By all measures, I think we’re doing pretty good and my focus for April will be to continue that trend right through while increasing subscribers and visitors.
In the next day or two, I plan to post up a comprehensive breakdown of everything that’s happened to us over the last month so you can see what we’ve accomplished and where we want to go. I also want to examine what has worked for us and what hasn’t, with the hopes that you can follow along with us as we figure this thing out. Until then, thanks to everyone who has stuck with us so far, we really appreciate your support. Here’s to a kick ass April!
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Excellent blog and if I read it correctly you have only been around for a month ? Wow great work. Love the end of the month roll up very good idea. Thanks for dropping by LifeIsRisky.Com earlier. I appreciate it and hope you will drop back in again. Adding you to my weekly web wanderings!
First time commenter/reader. Congrats on one month. After strolling through your archives, I must say that I’m impressed. The writing is fluid, insightful, and, most importantly, thought provoking. Good job! You’ve made a reader out of me.
Thank you both for the kind words. Hopefully you’ll find a lot of our content worthwhile for reading. We’ve only been at it a month so far, so there is plenty more to come
Stark, congrats on the first month! You have really accomplished a lot in just a month!
Nice, I’d be looking forward to the real-world-experience references, those are always good and give your blog truly unique content.
As for too many ad blocks - an interesting trick is to serve up extras for certain referrers (say just for SE traffic), while any regular readers always see just the cleaner version.
I enjoyed the post mostly because I’m going through a similar “site redesign” both in the area of topical focus and overall site look and feel. As for trying to be unique, I don’t think you need to worry too much about that. Unique is not completely about topic but also about your voice and presentation of material. If everything had to be unique, then there would only be one of everything out there. If you believe your voice and presentation on a topic is unique, then go ahead and write about something that everyone else seems to be writing.
As for suggestions for improvement, I like the design and flow of your site but have a personal preference for the link to add comments at the bottom of the post. I’m usually compelled to comment on a post once I’ve finished reading it. Therefore I don’t find it intuitive to have to scroll back to the top of a post to find the comment link. I like to find it at the bottom of the post where I normally find myself when I’ve finished reading it. Other than that, I think you’ve got a good blog. I’ve bookmarked it and plan to return on a routine basis. Keep up the good work.
I have been visiting this blog regularly. i m so much impressed particularly by the theme this blog uses. i m using the similar theme for my blog which is under construction and it will be in wordpress . i have blog in SimplePHPblog currently.
If you need any help configuring the theme, definitely let me know and I’ll help if I can. I really like the theme myself, except everything was in German
I had to spend a good 3-4 hours with an online translator changing everything to English. haha!