The Life in the Fast Lane team are on a mission to try to understand ‘why this blog is not a blog‘. We are following the advice of @problogger to see if we can develop a more informative, useful and practical blog for your reading pleasure with the 31 days to build a better blog program!
The idea is simple. By the end of this challenge you’ll have learned 31 aspects of blogging and put them into practice. It is designed not only to fill your head with knowledge ABOUT blogging but also give you some concrete things to do to actually DO something with the knowledge.
To start the blog rebuilding process we have
- Installed analytics programmes (Google Analytics, Woopra and WordPress Stats)
- Applied to DMOZ directory fro a listing under Health/Medicine/PersonalPages
- Create our OWN Google Customised Search
- Reviewed the Official Google Australia Blog for news and updates
- Reviewed free resources to analyse, evaluate and treat our slow loading blog (Top 10 listed below)
- Found some cool Bookmarklets
- Added a couple of WP plugins to assist with analysis and treatment
- Broken Link Checker (Fixed 800 problematic redirects and 257 broken links!)
- Spider Tracker (MSN / Yahoo not crawling and Google barely crawling)
Top 10 Free Website Analysis Tools
- WAVE errors (Web Accessibillity Evaluation Tool)
- Simplest of all the tools. Hover over the error and read the message – fantastic
- Sitonomy – Analysis of the Anatomy of a Website
- Great analysis with provision of alternatives for some of the tools I was using on the blog
- Website Optimisation Analyzer
- Very useful. Provided a complete web Page Speed Report, diagnosis, analysis and recommendations.
- Lots of great hints for reducing image size and compressing CSS to increase page load time (a major contributing factor to crawler access)
- Pingdom Page Speed Checker
- Isolated some elements which took a long time to load and removed them
- W3C Links Checker
- Identified some very basic errors with the blog which I could easily fix!
- Basic Website Review
- Simple, comprehensible and efficient. I like color coding, percentage scores and data that fits on one page!
- SEO Browser
- Nice way to visualise the different levels of links within a webpage
- Cynthia Says
- I learned that every image needs an alternative text…
- Craig Cecil Ultimate Website Checker
- Not just a list of website, but all the appropriate forms to fill in for every detailed analysis you can imagine
- UItest.com Website Analysis
- Comprehensive series of test links form this page
- One form that does it all…well more than enough to confuse me!
- Much of the information went straight over my head, but looked very inclusive
Some useful ‘testing’ bookmarklets
A bookmarklet is a little JavaScript snippet contained in a hyperlink. Drag the Bookmarklet (usually displayed as a text link) to your browser Bookmarks menu OR Favorites menu. Then when you are at the relevant page, click the Bookmarklet and it will do its magic. I installed these Bookmarklets to analyse problem pages within the blog.
- Steve Kangas fantastic bookmarklet collection. Try dragging this link List All Links to your toolbar. his bookmarklet creates a new page with just the links (the URLs) that appear in whichever page you are viewing.
- UItest.com Total Site Check Bookmarklet Site Check Bookmarklet
Stage 1 complete…fix the CSS 2.1
I guess that means we are just about ready to start….off to check the webmetrics of the blog next…
About Mike Cadogan
