The Free Website Project

I’ve been a long time fan of the free advertising network AdGridwork, a service that has grown astoundingly since I first discovered them back in September (read that post). Today, though, Nick and Kyle have decided to expand their work into blogging about advertising for all us free webmasters. Nick wanted my thoughts on their redesign, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to write a post and let everyone know about a blog that I really hope will become a resource worth checking out. Here are my suggestions to Nick, although you should feel free to visit the blog, read their game plan and come up with your own:

The New Design

The new design looks great, something I’ve noticed with both the AdGridwork and ReviewBack services. It’s very web2.0 and focuses on the color green. Since I’m not a designer, and the look is so awesome, I’ll focus more on the functional elements of the new, better layout. Let’s start with the sidebar:

The sidebar is probably the most important functional part of a blog. First off, the feed logo is currently too small and embedded in a bunch of text. Since RSS is the main way people keep tabs on bloggers these days, why not biggify enlarge that so that the subscribe box looks something like this:

Further down, you might want to replace that “Recent Postings” feed with one of recent comments. People can already see what you’ve just posted, and giving them a comment update encourages community, leading to repeat visitors. This still leaves a bunch of space, which you can use later to promote feature posts or to add some other widget.

The main content area is the place where you display everything you’ve written, so why not make it a little more “bloggy". To do this, I’d change the permalinks to not look like giant regular links, and give them a rollover effect like mine have. This is just a personal preference, but I think a green color would match better with your site. Whatever you do with the titles, make the text bigger and show fewer posts on each page. That way, people don’t get lost in the “text-desert” and your posts are more scanable.

The footer is an often neglected place, and I myself haven’t yet put it to good use, but you may want to keep in mind for later on that it can be dead useful for more space .

The New Content

Take it from me: blogging is a lot of work! If you want readers who return, you need to update regularly and with consistency. My suggestion would be to try to stay on topic. You’ve already set the niche on free advertising opportunities and techniques, which is awesome. There’s a lot out there free on the internet, and people respond great to things that help them promote their site, so you shouldn’t be running out of things to say.

One way to help with the inevitable blogger burnout is to set limits on your blogging (read my post on expansive minimalism), yet another solution is to find guest writers and posts. Keep in mind, though, that people tend to prefer when there are one or two guiding voices that keep everything together. If you’re ever out of ideas, you know my email .

So that’s it for my short review of the blog. For all you (twelve or so) readers out there, go ahead and bookmark this one and come back in a week. My prediction: you’ll be pleasantly surprised!