I Need Some Help (“Yes, We Know Lance.”)

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Okay, not help with ‘That’.

But help with my Blog. More than one person has offered some constructive criticisms on my Layout:

“Too Busy Home Page”

“Impossible to read on a mobile device” (I have no ‘mobile devices’. Unless you count a throw-away $49 Walmart Phone and a bicycle.)

“Poorly indexed”

“Very difficult to search for ANYThing”

“Hard on the eyes”

“Disorganized”

“Frustrating”

“Too Leftist and too much Lenny”

(Okay: I threw that last bit in just for fun.)

“Never finishes a serial post”

(Okay! Busted! But for those of you following my Series On “Biker’s Wife of Bath,” I will finish it… or at least continue it)  mañana

And some others.

My request, for when y’all have time: Please tell me your thoughts/opinions/suggestions to improve the ease of Navigation and any other suggestions you may have. And… They do not all have to be constructive. What I mean, is that if my Blog Layout frustrates you, here is the venue to vent.

I will take all rants / vents / suggestions in good humour and will work to rectify, because we all have time valuable, and do not need to waste it searching for something which should take just one mouse click to find, yet sometimes doesn’t.

Thank You All in advance for any help you may offer. (I really have not been doing this Blog Thing for very long, and although I do pride myself in my ‘Communication Skills’, the delivery system is obviously flawed.) And no! I do not subscribe to the notion:

“If you build it, they will come.”

That has always been bullshit and,

I am not that vain.

To recap:

I am asking for your help.

‘Tis a message in a bottle; Pick it up and uncork it.

Cheers,

Lance

45 thoughts on “I Need Some Help (“Yes, We Know Lance.”)”

  1. No, not a mobile device issue: ‘A Stupid Lance Issue’. It always irritated me too. Glad I finally got around to figuring out how to fix it.
    Still working on rectifying the other issues.
    Thanks for your patience.
    Cheers,
    -Lance

  2. I am glad you asked this question. The comment section was very hard for me to read and manipulate, so I was thrilled to see you correct this. I don’t know if it was because I am usually reading on a mobile device.

  4. Thank you so much Sadie.
    I do believe I have fixed the comments part.
    Now I gotta work on the other problems.
    I do appreciate your visits, much more probably than you realize.
    🙂

  5. Lance – I find your site easy to navigate, though I have never looked at it on my phone. I read a few comments about the way the comments sometimes nest – and they do stack oddly. I know I find myself here often . . . so must not need to change much other than maybe the comment nesting 🙂 BUT that’s not gonna keep me from reading!!

  6. Thank you very much Mark. That is wonderful praise (and I am loving it).
    Honestly, I am going to try to completely redesign this blog to make it more readable and user-friendly. It is a daunting task, but I will get it done, hopefully sooner than later.
    Meantime, I appreciate your patience My Friend.
    And thanks for the feedback. It helps.

  8. Lance, I’d read you if I had to squint through a desert sandstorm. Which I feel like I do sometimes. I’m not a fan of the dark background, white text. It tires my eyes in a matter of sentences. I don’t prefer the narrow alleys of type. I prefer a bit wider of a grid for my eyes to scan.

    Thank you for asking.

  9. Hey thanks for that. Lemme play around with the themes a bit and if I can’t make them look like I want, I will definitely take you up on that.
    Cheers,
    -Lance

  10. No problem! If you don’t know css, I do have the code at least for changing the font colors and size in the body of the post. That was my first priority!

  12. You’re welcome! My format bothers me as well sometimes. I don’t think there is a perfect format. Have a great evening!

  13. Thanks Anna. I do appreciate your kind words.
    Loyal readers make this whole blog – business worth it.
    Cheers,
    Lance
    🙂

  14. Thank you Sarah. And glad you are able to view with your phone. This is encouraging. I will continue to try to improve things around here (“Do it Lance! Do it for the Readers!”)
    😉

    Thanks again for your visit and taking the time to comment.
    -Lance

  15. Excellent point on the ‘paragraphs’ thing. I agree. What irritates me about my theme is that when writing dialog extra space is forced on me by WP. Not sure how to fix that. I need to fix it though. Makes for way too much scrolling, etc.
    Thank you Laura for the feedback. I need it!
    Cheers,
    -Lance

    P.S. I just cannot help myself with the videos. Yep. Sometimes I go too far.
    😉

  16. I really do like your theme (SORBET THEME). Your blog is crisp, clean, very user friendly and easy to read. I do have the customization package, so I will be experimenting with this one.
    Thanks very much for your feedback. It has been very helpful.

    Cheers,
    –Lance

  17. Other than what someone else mentioned about the indentations of comments if they go back & forth awhile, I honestly like the layout of your blog.

    You’re also very quick to help people aka ME to find something when I forget what I was reading. Hey, that’s my problem and brain misfiring. Not yours. I appreciate how quickly you respond & help when I can’t find something. To me, that’s worth more than anything.

    Your loyal reader who often forgets what she’s reading,
    Anna 🙂

  18. Your site is extremely easy to navigate on my phone, and I like how readable the text is. I wish I could offer some further advice, but I haven’t really started to play around with the themes and web design settings on WordPress yet. Maybe later this summer though. Good luck with your blog design!

  19. Well…if truth be told it is a bit busy. Space is good between paragraphs but perhaps you need some of those…paragraphs I mean. lol. Like two-sentence ones. Singular lines make a reader discouraged and want to skim over what you’re saying. it’s a balance between what is too much and too little. I couldn’t tell you about layouts though as I’m not a web developer. I prefer simple and clean and no videos unless it’s part of my post. But everyone has a different opinion I’m sure.

  20. I am probably the wrong person to ask since I am constantly trying to get y’all to make my blog appearance decisions for me. I do like my current theme because it responds well on phones and tablets, the comments “stack” better and the text is black on white but I can still have different backgrounds in general.

    Problem with my theme is that unless you have the customization package, the default text color is dark grey. fine if you want to remember the change the color of every post before you publish, hard to read (for me) if you don’t.

  21. Thanks Annie,
    Comments problem fixed (I think).
    Color scheme, yeah. That needs to change. I concur.
    Appreciate your great feedback.
    Peace,
    Lance

  22. All good, constructive criticisms. And appreciated. I think I finally fixed the problem with the comments; has been bugging me too.
    As far as tsunami, working on that too. May be more difficult to resolve that one.
    Thanks for the feedback.
    Cheers Friend

  23. Only two things make it rough on me to read your blog when I come home beat from work: The color scheme and the way EVERY comment reply gets indented further and further. Other than that, it’s golden.

  24. If you’re going to ask for constructive criticism then you’re not allowed to get angry when some is offered. Reet? I agree with Hap. The comments turn into poems. They’re hard to read when the words are all stacked on top of one another. The only other thing is the tsunami of content. I count +/- 15 posts in the last week alone. I can’t keep up with that, brother! When I go into my reader and see a shitload of unread content I get an anxiety attack and guess what I do? I clear my reader, reading none of it. It’s too much of a good thing but I don’t know if that’s anything that needs to be “fixed.” You can’t stop the need to write. You might just as well ask the ocean to not meet the shore.

  25. “Don’t want ne’re’un”
    (That is definitely a “Peanut-Isum…”)
    Um…
    Touché
    Laughing my ass off!
    Again!
    Hey! I am working the problem with my ‘delivery!”
    Hahahah!

  26. I have no suggestions, but it would be nice if deeply nested comments weren’t stacks of words.

    And no, dammit, I ain’t givin’ ya a Like for this one. 😀

  27. Thank you Ester.
    I do appreciate that. (your sentiment)
    Honestly.
    (But…. ‘improvement’ is a luxury I wanna embrace.)
    –Lancer

  29. Not sure what the future may harbor, but I have never been happy with the ‘layout’ of my blog,
    But then, sometimes my life has disappointed me too.
    Cheers,
    Lance

  30. Ya know David,
    I do love how you ‘call me out’ when I go off on a tangent.
    Sincerely.
    And yet, you keep coming back.

    From you, this comment is high praise.
    And I do appreciate it.
    Thank you.

  41. Okay. I just looked at your Blog again.
    It is clean, easy for navigation and of course I like it.
    I am certainly no expert, but it is easy on the eye and I will look deeper, but for now, I see no problem with it.
    Of course, we can all improve. I am just asking for help for me here (and for my readers), as I do not want to lose readers due to some ‘inadequackery’ (Is that a word?) on my part.
    🙂
    Thank You very much for your visit, and for your comment.
    Cheers,
    Lancelot

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