I’ve been developing the design of my blog the last few weeks. Small tweaks here and there to make the user experience better.
The last few days though I’ve made some bigger changes to the layout of my posts. Have you spotted them?
I REMOVED DISQUS
It was back in August that I decided to remove CommentLuv Premium from my blog and install Disqus. It wasn’t a quick decision. I’d been thinking about it for quite some time.
I had issues with broken links and spam using CommentLuv. I know there was a way around the spam issue but I wasn’t happy restricting people without a Gravatar from commenting.
I was delighted that by installing Disqus both issues disappeared overnight.
I thought of it as an experiment initially and decided I’d give it until the end of the year to see how things went. We’re not quite there yet but I’ve decided to remove Disqus for the time being.
Using Disqus was a dream and made managing comments super easy. The notification system was fantastic. I was impressed with the conversations that Disqus allowed to happen on my blog.
A niggling problem wouldn’t go away though. Several people contacted me over the past few months to let me know they weren’t able to comment. It wasn’t the fact that they had to log in but that Disqus just wouldn’t load.
BACK TO THE NATIVE WORDPRESS COMMENTING SYSTEM
The nail in the coffin came when my blogging buddy Erik Emanuelli sent me a message on Facebook. The problem was he couldn’t answer a comment on his guest post.
In the past, Disqus has just started working again after a few days. Both Lorraine Reguly from Wording Well and Ray from DialMe.com had this happen to them after contacting me to say Disqus wasn’t working. I didn’t make any changes to get it to work so I’ve no idea why.
So now, it’s back to the native WordPress commenting system.
It may be short term or it may be for longer, I’m not sure yet. I couldn’t recreate the issues people were having but I didn’t want to put a barrier in their way either.Have you had any similar experiences with Disqus?
I REMOVED THE SIDEBAR
Did you notice?
It was liberating to remove it.
I was never happy with having a sidebar. It always made the main content seem less symmetrical. I had a couple of things in my sidebar but after scrolling for a while it becomes wasted space.
It was something I decided to do after reading Three Web Design Trends to Consider for 2015 by Danny Brown. I want my blog to be all about the content and helping people. Sidebars can be overdone and from my experience often ignored by visitors.
I also want a more creative design on my blog, particularly the blog posts themselves.
Someone who often mirrors my thoughts is Jens-PetterBerget from Slymarketing.com. He recently changed his blog to a minimalist theme and removed comments whilst his blog was being redesigned.
His redesigned blog also has no sidebar. He’s reinstated comments with the native WordPress comments system, albeit including CommentLuv.
Is your sidebar redundant too?
I’M NOW USING A FULL WIDTH DESIGN
The Dynamik Website Builder allows you to use a fixed or a fluid design. I was using the fluid design which allows everything apart from your post content to be full width.
Yet, I wanted to be able to use a completely fluid design, including the post content.
With that in mind, I fired up Google and searched for a solution. It didn’t take me too long to find what I needed, although not all on the same website.
The article Add Full Width Wrap to the Inner Content of a Page in Genesis Theme at WP Beaches gave me part of the solution. Genesis Structural Wraps & Creating a Full Width Genesis Child Theme at GenesisTutorials.com helped me with the rest.
In the Dynamik Website Builder Custom Options I added the following code to Functions:
The result means that I can now use the full width of my blog in the content section. At the same time, I can contain the post content within a wrap and centred on the page. I changed the wrap to max-width so that I can make the content responsive.
If you don’t have the Dynamik Website Builder you can still achieve the same effect. You can place the function in your functions.php file and the CSS in your CSS stylesheet.
WHY AM I USING A FULL WIDTH DESIGN?
I’ve been using a plugin called WP Profit Builder now for a few weeks to enhance posts and to build landing pages.
When building a landing page, I can use a separate page template developed for WP Profit Builder. With posts though, the plugin uses the default template.
WP Profit Builder comes into its own when using a full width template although it works fine otherwise.
My motivation for making my site full width arises from Danny Brown’s post I mentioned before. I want to be able to do something like you can with the Aesop Story Engine. Now I can with WP Profit Builder.
The possibilities are exciting!
TIME TO FOCUS ON STORY-TELLING
I plan to focus more on story-telling as often as I can. It makes a blog post much more interesting, don’t you think?
I keep coming back to the fact that blogging should be about the actual writing and engagement. It seems to have become less about that and more about how many comments you can get. There needs to be a balance in my opinion.
Putting too much emphasis on comments is a giant red herring.
Blog comments are often thought of as some kind of social proof but I don’t buy that. Joshua Wilner puts things into perspective in his post What Is The Value Of A Blog Comment?. I definitely don’t want:
29 different versions of “great post” added to the 33 different ways that others said “thank you for writing this.”
I’d rather have a comments section that generates content ideas and promotes debate. That takes time and it comes from spending more time on ensuring what you’re writing is as good as it can be.
