Blogs that Scare Me: Content Loads Last.

Over the weekend, I examined the fright-factor of two blogs Chris Garrett asked readers to evaluate. Today I’ll discuss Problogger.

I’ve been a fan of ProBlogger for years; I thought I loved his template. But today, I’m focused on seeing it the way a first time visitor sees it.

With that in mind, I show you this:

Do you see the problem?

I do. I’m on DSL. The page loads sufficiently slowly to permit me to click on my “preview” tool, pull down a menu, select “grab window”, move the little camera over the screen and click. In fact, I can stop and sip coffee as I do this.

That means that I see nothing but sidebars for quite some time.

Darren’s site is worth waiting for, so I do. I visited Darren’s site way back when I only blogged knitting. I wanted a few tips to make the adSense convert to clicks. His advice works for me.

Darren also intersperses his posts with some fun articles that fit his niche. He is generous about dropping links to a wide variety of other good blogs. He drops the links quickly- so I generally haven’t already seen the links at other blogs. I also never get the impression the link dropping is directed to “the chosen few”. This means that I generally find interesting blogs when I click links Darren drops.

Darren’s layout is consistent with his information oriented content and his content is great. But he might want to tweak his CSS style sheet!

I have to thank ChrisG for this exercise. I learned something today: Even a terrific popular blog in the world may have a flawed template!

From now on, I’ll remember to try to copy the good and fix the mistakes.

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