When life calls and you must leave your unfortunate blog dormant for a while, there are certain things I highly recommend doing before you do.

Have akismet installed. If you don’t then expect to come back to 400 spam comments that you then have to delete manually. Oh the joys. One or two spam comments a day I can deal with, but bucket loads at once will make you want to not come back.

Browse 300 blogs in a day and you’ll quickly stop reading. That’s because at certain times of the year, everyone seems to start writing about the same topics. Readers only want to read it once.

It matters little whether you are able to give a topic a ‘fresh new take’, avoid writing a post on thes topics!

• Pagerank. Whether it when up or down or did a loop-de-loop, we don’t care and many of us have the google toolbar so can see for ourselves.
• “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while.” Honestly, we can see that and if there’s a shiny new post there, so be it. Make it a good one, not a “Look everybody I’m back!”
• Pictures you took off another blog. If they’re on one blog, they’re probably already seen, especially if you use the same social networks (eg Entrecard)
• Lists of interesting facts that aren’t true.
• Endless complaints about mild inconveniences some free service has caused.
• The same old ‘make money with adsense/bidvertiser/payperpost/other well established organisation’ story that provides no new insight, humour, feedback or experience.  

Fresh, original content is what the internet wants. News, not Olds.

This review is for It is nap time, a self-hosted blog of a stay at home mum.

Now I’m not a parent myself and I don’t know much about it, but I do know that white font on a pale blue background may be a nice colour scheme, but not if you actually want to read the text. And medium blue text on a brown background is also painful to read.

And my goodness, would you look at that! There’s 40 posts on the main page! 10 posts is the high end of normal, but 40!

There must be a better layout out there somewhere, surely there are free blogger templates around? It needs to change. Fix the colours, reduce the number of posts displayed one page, decide whether you really need all those plugins and widgits in the sidebars and generally tidy up. The blog will be much more approachable and readable then.

I must appologise for the delay, and without any further ado introduce you all to Diligent Design.

The first thing that strikes me is that the blog is very neat. The blue theme is professional looking, but I must say it’s wonderful to see colourful thumbnails next to the most recent posts. They lift the page and catch the eye, which is something most blogs need in this era of tiny attentionspans.

The content is presented on the homepage as short paragraphs with a “Continue Reading” link. Certain web users with hang-ups about page load times would complain that they have to click another link before reading the article and that full posts should be visible on the homepage, but I have no complaints in this case. The summaries work well and keep the page tidy.

The information is easy to understand and covers a good range of topics about general blogging and networking without a heavy focus on making money, or being more eficient. This makes it a light hearted but useful read and doesn’t put you under any pressure to optimise your blog or lower your bounce rate.

The monkey I don’t quite understand. (I assume it’s a monkey, it may be a particularly ugly child.) As a logo it could be well utilised as a trademark for the blog. It could be used as an entrecard card, a forum avatar or even as a favicon, but I only see it twice on the page. There’s some potential there.

Overall, a 6 out of 10.

You’ve got to try this.

Go to the Google homepage.

Type in “find Chuck Norris”.

Click the “I’m feeling lucky” button. (more…)