I tend to go through a big purge-fest once a month, and oddly enough it starts right before I have a big project to work on.
I don't know if it's the idea of having a clean, clear work space to promote a clean, clear mind, but it seems like that's the only connection I can make for why I go on a blitzkrieg of cleanliness before I do some major writing work.
Anyway, I'm a bit of a hoarder, and most of it is paperwork. I take copious notes on everything and shove them in notebooks or worse, stack them loosely and then promise myself "I'll get to them later." I save magazines and dog-ear them for articles that may be helpful to my writing; I also have an unhealthy obsession with office supplies!
All of this is related to writing--research, writing tools, writing utensils, notebooks, notes, folders...so I guess the connection is actually very clear. I hold onto things that I think are necessary to write, and then when I realize I don't really need them, I dump them, or reassess their value. And I do this so often that it becomes ritualized--in order for me to write, and write well...I have to simplify. And that means chuck everything that weighs me down or complicates the process.
For the things that I do find useful (such as hand-written notes or those magazine articles), I scan them to my PC and shove in my research folder. My research folder for
The Name and the Key is incredibly organized, unlike everything else in my life. I've got a very specific list of sub-folders for even more specific topics, so whatever I scan makes its way in there.
In other spring cleaning news, I am still working on making this website the best I can. That's very tricky because
sometimes I want to punch Google in the face for making formatting in Blogger so effing difficult. Don't even get me started on working with images in text. Oyyyy. I'm not the only one who finds the whole thing to be ridiculous: see
here,
here, and especially
here.
Anyway, what made me frustrated the other day was
trying to sync my Blogger-powered website with Google +. The
only reason I wanted to do this was to be able to easily share my posts to Google +, because I couldn't find another way. So, I went ahead and synced the profiles, and Google + totally messed with my profile photo. It wouldn't keep the dimensions or anything else, so it took me...not kidding...like two hours (and twelve different photos) to get one that was centered and the right size so it wouldn't look stupid on my website.
 |
...I have a love-hate relationship with you.
Why can't we just get along? |
After that debacle,
my sister and I were discussing how to make our sites better and she let me know that my website doesn't load very well and the size is too wide. To be able read it, she has to scroll to the right. So I can see how annoying that is, and if the website doesn't load properly, then it would explain why
Google Analytics shows me why 63% of people who come to my website only stay for 0-10 seconds. I also have a 69.8% drop-off rate, which means people click and quickly leave. The drop-off rate shows that more than one issue is at work here. Part of it could be the website loading problems, but it could also mean my content is irrelevant to the people who come here, or it just doesn't hold any interest to the people who click on my webpage.
That speaks to a larger problem I'll have to deal with as I go. In the meantime I've decided to try and work with the easiest first, and that meant trying to fix the design. So I went ahead and redid my margins. I also lightened colors on the website (the orange was starting to hurt, so I went a couple shades lighter, and changed pure white to one shade darker, which I call "barely gray"). I removed a lot of clutter on the sides of the posts, primarily the images...I just felt like it was too much to look at. I even played around with different backgrounds but couldn't find anything that complemented my business cards (I'm trying to keep with theme).
Then I decided to view my webpage on different devices and with different browsers.
Henceforth my resounding
ARRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
There is no consistency in how my website loads. The site looks the best on
Chrome, but I'm sure it's because I work with Chrome. The site is too large in
Internet Explorer 9, so it chops things off and loads them below where they should be, totally eradicating all the symmetry I work my ass off to obtain. (Again, trying to go for symmetrical design in
Blogger is ridiculously difficult).
Firefox also loads the page differently. It matches Chrome for the most part, but the fonts come across at different sizes, so anything I make larger or smaller than "normal" is distorted. IE9 does this to some of my fonts, too.
Of all the browsers, IE9 is still the dominant one, used by the majority of my viewers. So if the site looks like crap on IE9, it doesn't matter how pretty it looks in Chrome or Firefox.
I tried out my devices, too. My
Ipad loads everything well except for when I try to divide articles within a page by doing this:
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instead of the line being straight across, different browsers chop the lines up and reformat them, shooting symmetry down again and whacking out the spacing. My Ipad breaks the dotted lines up in this way, too.
My
Iphone loaded the web page just fine for mobile viewing, but the font colors were difficult to read. The "view desktop" version didn't load well, again chopping and redistributing things. I recently reformatted the mobile version of the site to "Simple" to try and make it legible.
I think the only reformatting I enjoy of my website is by a completely different application entirely:
Flipboard. This is what Flipboard does to my website for optimal viewing on mobile phones and tablets, as my Ipad demonstrates:
See how nice these look? The closest thing Blogger offers to having a format like this is their
Dynamic Views, but I previewed my blog through each of those templates and they just don't do what I needed them to do.
If formatting and designing your website is that important to readership and web traffic, why is it so difficult to provide THE SAME WEBSITE for every browser, every device?
I don't have the money to hire a web programmer or designer. I don't have the time or patience to learn HTML or other types of coding.
Most of the online blogs--
Word Press,
Blogger, etc.--are designed for the average consumer to create and maintain a website easily.
So far, I've found it isn't easy. And the formatting and lack of consistency is pissing me off.
I shouldn't have to go through three browsers and redesign my webposts to make sure they look decent in every one. I tried that the other day and it just added unnecessary hours to what normally brings me a lot of pleasure. Blogging just shouldn't be this difficult!
Grrr...
Ok, I'm going back to cleaning. In the meantime, I added more content to
Geekery and updated the
Etc. tab. Be sure to take a look! :)
