Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The State of the Blog

A few years ago, I started this blog as an outlet to talk about WoW because my social network friends didn't understand what I was talking about.  It has jumped from private to public and back again a few times.  I've talked about my past and my future, my successes and failures, my guildmates, myself, and the state of the game in general.

Lately I've been struggling to build up an audience.  I've been trying to write more about WoW as a game and include links to blogs and other sources I find useful in my gameplay.  I've used forum signatures and Twitter to advertise.  Overall, it seems to be working.  After tweaking my page layout and using cuts, I can see that about 60% of my visitors are reading one or more of my articles, spending an average of 2-3 minutes on the site.  I can identify 5-6 visitors that I know, and a handful of others that I don't know but return every once in a while.

I've been brainstorming about what I can do to make this blog better.  Specifically, I think I need to do some design work.  I've tweaked the Blogger template a bunch, but the graphics are dull.  Blogger is very "wall of text".  I know enough about web design to know that information overload is bad.  I don't think I can accomplish everything I want to with this site and continue to use the Blogger interface.  Having a personalized address is seeming more necessary as I establish my WoW web identity as separate from my other web activities.

Ironically, WoW is what hinders the development of this blog the most.  Generally, when I have free time I'm in-game doing what I like to do: play WoW.  It's been a while since I fired up Dreamweaver and I know it's going to be quite a few man hours before it's in any shape to publicize.  There's the added complication that I have been advertising at this address, and need to figure out the technical details of how to switch over without losing readers.  Really, I'd like to keep Blogger as a base for my writing, so I'll need to figure out how to integrate it into a more complex site.

So there it is, the state of the blog.  I'd like this to be a centralized place to link off to the WoW communities I contribute to, and in the process give a window into how a "serious casual" player operates.  I want to help fill that gap between full time raiders and the folks who are not on the Internet looking for WoW stuff anyway.  Most of all, I want to do this for myself and make something out of the time I spend in the community.  My web design skills were getting a bit rusty anyway.

2 comments:

  1. I think this blog is a wonderful idea. The only reason I do not read it? I don't play Wow (I know, blasphemy). So, I have no frame of reference. But, keep at it! Articles, commentaries, Blogs... ALL GOOD!

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  2. Thx for the support, I know it's a narrow topic, that's what makes it fun!

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