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Comment by zackattack | Hacker News Reader

If someone would please review ZacharyBurt.com (any one of the 3 most recent entries would be ideal) and tell me how to improve it, that would be very much appreciated..

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I found the diagram "Diagram illustrating relationship between Users, UX, Product Manager, Engineering" in your latest post very simple and useful. Summarising big ideas from a book makes for a good blog post. The only thing I didn't like was that it got too long. Long posts are good but only if there's more of a narrative. Lists are better when they are short.

Maybe I'm not the right audience, but I see your recent posts are quite abstract and almost academic-sounding. Do you think you can convey your thoughts through stories instead? Perhaps thoughts on emotions may be better explored and expressed through writing which evokes emotion.

This is amazing and very useful feedback. Thank you very much. I will work harder to convey my thoughts through stories instead.

I have some eyesight issues and other issues that can interfere with ability to focus at times. The black text on a white background with nothing to really break up the space or clearly delineate anything makes it difficult for me to even read the site. There are lots and lots of other people in the world with similar challenges. A smidgeon of design work to help set the body of the writing apart from the title and sidebar might help. (EDIT: Oh, and try to cut down on the glare factor. It doesn't take much. HN is much, much easier for me to read. Subtle grey background cuts down on the glare and helps delineate the body. It makes a big difference without being very obvious that anything was done at all.)

I'm not a big fan of the "myname.com" address. If I don't already know you, it tells me nothing about the blog. If someone is already famous, okay, it makes sense, people will look for them under their name. Otherwise, I don't see any real value in it as a positioning thing. But if you want to go with "myname.com", at least give some descriptor of what you talk about/who you are/what the blog is about in the title. "myname.com" followed by "My Name's Blog" -- uh, there's no there there. Wait until you are world famous to go with "My Name's Blog". Until then, you need to do a little more packaging to get across why I should be interested in reading this stuff.

HTH and good luck.

Thanks for the feedback. I have significantly updated the blog's design pursuant to your feedback. What do you think now, how should I adjust?

while you are at it, you may visit blog.lifeasparesh.in. I do have some visitors from different organic sources but the problem is nobody comments.

You might try putting your email address prominently on the site instead of burying it in your profile. I generally make it a habit of making my email address readily available on every page of any website I own. I haven't read through the comments carefully recently, but I have gotten tons and tons of spam on my blogs and no real comments but people email and talk to me about stuff I am doing and that is valuable feedback, as well as a valuable human connection.

So basically I should like put it in the side bar or something? I made a contact me tab which lists all the ways of reaching me.

That's what I typically do. I used to have it in the footer until someone indicated they couldn't find my email address on the site. They thought I didn't have one on the site at all. So I made it more prominent.

I am going to just hack up some dirty HTML for this. Any suggested widgets?

If you are using Wordpress, it has a "text" box. You can put your dirty html in there. That's what I did on several sites recently. If you want to mung the address, feel free to borrow the javascript from any of my sites (assuming you dont already know how -- you might know lots more than me, if so: nevermind).

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