Web design

Objectives
a) To make it easier for readers people to sign up for the blog
b) improve navigation and make it more user friendly
c) improve interaction with readers to encourage them to leave comments, etc
d) Improve SEO of blog, ways to monetarise, track user stats, etc
e) improve the look of the blog.


To make it easier for readers people to sign up for the blog
1. For social media sharing: I was thinking of using Twitter/Facebook share buttons. Are there also other things I can use other than share button? What about a bookmark button?
2. A Feedburner subscription box on home page and right hand side column (above RSS feed) in order to collect emails and make people subscribe to my RSS.
3. Can you make the RSS feed button bigger?
4. Possibly integrate some other Facebook add-ons. Suggestions?
5. Make Subscribe form visible on the home page instead of having it in the menu (which is how you did it on that mark up you did for me). On this blog she uses feedblitz
http://kristainlondon.typepad.com/dining/

6. Anything else you can think of to make subscribing or signing up to my RSS feed easier?


To improve navigation and make it more user friendly
7. In the navigation bar across the top, the archives drop down and category drop down is too long. I think the problem with it is that when you drop down, you cant see all the way to the bottom of the drop down so people wont use it so I would like to move these to the sidepanel
8. Anyway, I think rather than have ‘CATEGORY’ as a drop down in the navigation bar, I would rather the following in the sidepanel so readers can search alphabetically, by their requirements and by archive (dates)
a. A dropdown, or where you click and it takes you to a different page, of restaurants listed alphabetically BY
i. London restaurants
ii. UK restaurants outside London
iii. Sydney restaurants
iv. Fine dining restaurants outside the UK

b. I want them to be able to search
i. by area and/or (I don’t current tag by area eg Battersea but I can do this)
ii. by postcode and/or
iii. cuisine and/or
iv. by range of prices (I currently don’t tag by range of prices but I can do this for each historical post and going forwards) and
v. with the functionality of being to pick one or all criteria for the search

As examples, check these bloggers out for an idea of the kind of search function I am looking for, although I want mine to be more detailed
http://hungryinlondon.com/
http://www.gourmet-chick.com/

but I want it such that you can zone in on more than one search criteria.

c. archive by date like this blog (on her left panel where she archives last 12 months, then has a ‘more’ button which takes you to another page of archives).
http://kristainlondon.typepad.com/dining/

Improve interaction with readers to encourage them to leave comments
9. I want to allow for more user interaction:
a. comments
b. user ratings,
This blog has an example of a post rank that I’d like to incorporate

http://greedydiva.blogspot.com/

Other things I thought of include
c. social feeds,
d. geo-location,
e. Google maps, etc
f. Ability for users to subscribe to comment updates
g. User stats?
Any other ideas?

10. I would like a ‘Recent comments’ panel like this blog (its on her left hand panel)
http://kristainlondon.typepad.com/dining/

Improve the look of the blog.
11. Can you make the colour sharper and sexier? Any other colour suggestions?
12. I want to get rid of the orange colour for highlighted links. What colour would you recommend?

Improve SEO of blog, ways to monetarise, track user stats
13. Can we improve SEOness in the code?
14. Integrate Google analytics to track visitor stats, unique viewers, page visits, etc
15. Suggestions on how to monetarise? http://kristainlondon.typepad.com/dining/ has loads of ads.


Other
16. I would like a DONATE button where people can donate money to my blog. I want to call this a DONATE to the FEED THE GIRL FUND. Can you think it so it goes straight to paypal? I would also like to see a counter which adds up all donations. I’ll probably write a few words about how if people like reading my blog and would like to donate then please do so, etc…
17. Some emails in my email subscription sometimes double up. One time two emails got sent. Another time, 9 got sent. I am wondering if there is a problem with the coding
18. I got featured on toptable where they listed my top ten restaurants of 2010. I want to capture this page (like an exact copy and paste) on my blog so that if toptable ever takes it down I will always have a copy of this page on my blog. Here is the link
http://www.toptable.com/feature/?id=2535
Toptable took down the links to each of my blog posts because it was loading slowly.
Once this is done, I will link each of the ten restaurants to each individual post.
19. when people post a comment a funny ‘e’ comes up after the time. Can you please fix
20. a funny border comes on the right hand side up depending the version of IE used. Can you please get rid of this? It looks like it has doubled up.
21. http://kristainlondon.typepad.com has a google custom search function (on her right hand panel) which I would quite like to incorporate.