The Honest Way

The Honest Way Blog has been around for several months now in this layout and format and it’s quite a pleasant place. But lately, there seems to be a bit of a trend around with many bloggers changing their complete template.

Is this really necessary?

Is it because there are now some very professional looking blog templates available with three columns? Admittedly they give you more space for advertising. Or more space to fill up with something, at any rate. Or is it just a case of the grass looking greener on the other side of the fence? Is that why I’m even contemplating giving myself a whole load of work in changing the entire look of this blog.

And if I change the look of the blog, should I then go the whole hog and change the look of my entire site? As the main site is something I built myself (taken from a free template but extensively re-written by me) it would be a step backwards to have the entire site built out of a Wordpress template, because that would beg the question “Why did I go to all the trouble to learn how to build websites in the first place?”

Or should I leave the site as is and just change the blog?

I need some people to talk me out of this (or otherwise). What do you think?

Leave me a comment and let me know should I keep this blog the way it is or change it.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

The Honest Way and its Blog both got some well deserved love from Google today in the form of a PR3 page ranking!

Thank you Google!

This is great news for the site in general and this blog in particular, as it means I got the recognition for all my hard word in writing a ton of content and promoting this place hard in all the right places.

It’ll mean good things in the pipeline for The Honest Way as the blog can now make money with some of the monetization ideas that I have planned for it. This makes it all the more interesting for me and I’ll be passing on my ever enduring enthusiasm for this site to you, the readers of this blog in continued quality posts and informative articles.

I’d also like to mention that my JV partner Monika Mundell also got a PR3 for her site The Writers Manifesto and blog, so congratulations to her too.

Which leads me on to another congratulations for our JV social networking site Blogging Web 2.0, which at the tender young age of barely a month, just got a PR2!

That just proves that Google is constantly changing the way it rewards sites with page rank and it’s now pretty certain they are rewarding sites that put up a lot of good, relevant content and not just because they’ve been around for a long time and bought themselves a load of back-links. True and natural is the way to go people! A good site will get the recognition it deserves, so write lots of good content for your site and don’t ever copy (plagiarize) other people’s stuff and you’ll do well too.

So good times are ahead - stick with me and we’ll all go far!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Ok, I’m never satisfied with what I’ve got. So I like to tinker with things in the never ending quest to make things that little bit better.

In the case of this blog, I was getting a little tired of the look - so rather than go for a complete new template, which would work out to be a lot of work putting all the bits and pieces that have grown into this blog back into some semblance of order, I decided it would be better to just fiddle with the CSS a little and make it a bit more unique.

Why?

Well, when I first got this template, I had no idea there were so many to choose from, so I sort of just grabbed the first one I saw that looked like it would be similar to the layout of the main site. Well, it was a little different, but the sizes were the same, so the header fitted in fine and the sidebar is quite adequate for what I want to be doing with it.

So all I’ve done really is give the main post area a white background and touched up the sidebar a bit - and voila! Without much work at all, my template is a little different from everyone else’s!

I like individuality, don’t you?

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY