Getting Distracted Right Out of The Gate · Friday April 13, 2007
I am not a designer.
As evidence, just reference (if you were unfortunate enough to see it) the butchered version of wilshire|one’s White and Wild Textpattern theme that I was using when I fired this blog (back) up.
Earlier this week, in one segment of his wonderful IWillTeachYouToBeRich Week of Discontent:, Ramit Sethi explained that it isn’t the look of a blog that really matters, anyway.
I keep getting emails wondering about how to make a popular blog and I just scratch my head. So today, I’m going to share the “secret” with you.
No, you don’t need 25 Steps to a Wildly Successful Personal Finance Blog.
No, you don’t need a beautiful design. For the first two years of iwillteachyoutoberich, this blog looked like a piece of crap and had hundreds of articles on it (over 1MB of text/images) because I didn’t know how to do archives.
No, you don’t need Feedburner and the fanciest stats package. In fact, the more stats you have, the less you’ll write.
No, you don’t need the fanciest relevance plugin from Wordpress. Get a life.
The “secret” is simple: Write good articles on things people care about, and then tell the right people about it. But that’s not sexy enough, is it? Instead, people spin their wheels installing the latest plugin and wonder why their exquisitely measured site doesn’t get more readers.
Ramit’s post and the J. D. Roth post it references provided much of the impetus for me getting off my butt and take another crack at blogging.
Kinda silly, then, for me to have gotten caught up in fiddling with how things looked after posting a single article.
So now it’s “back to the basics”. The theme is back to the default, and I’ll see what I can do about writing stuff worth reading.
— Rod Knowlton
