Squirrelinabox Network (http://www.squirrelinabox.com)

Over at a blog I read regularly, ProBlogger, a blogger by the name of Darren Rowse has asked for bloggers to answer the basic question what would you do different? It’s one of those questions that I think is just as much about what you need to do in the future as it is about what you could have done in the past.

Let me explain a little more by focusing on my first blog, the Office Humor Blog. Probably the biggest mistake I made was one that I actually corrected fairly quickly (coincidentally enough, thanks to advice I found on Darren’s blog). You see, when I first started out, I did what many probably did, I created a quick and easy free Blogspot blog. I wrote a detailed post on this mistake already, but as a brief summary - Blogspot sucks. Compared to the features of Wordpress and the ability to host on your own domain (I believe it is possible with Blogspot, though it’s supposedly buggy), Wordpress is just that much better. After reading Darren’s blog and realizing all these things, I quickly made the switch to Wordpress and my own domain. Luckily my blog wasn’t very old and really didn’t have many visitors so the damage wasn’t so bad.

However, there have been a few other mistakes that I really can’t fix. An example of this is how when I first started my blog I bombarded it with prank posts. Now, the prank posts are probably one of the bigger draws to the blog and after using up all the good pranks that I knew within a matter of a month or two, I found myself lacking meaty content. I slowly was able to come up with more features to write about, but I learned that I shouldn’t blow my wad all at once. I’ve since taken advantage of Wordpress’ advance post feature and make sure to spread out the more detailed and popular articles. However, I did still waste a good batch of content that I’ll never get back.

As I’m just now starting to get into the swing of things, another thing I wish I had done would be to have started more blogs sooner. I had spent much of my time on some larger projects that will take quite some time. That time could have been spent launching some new blogs and testing the waters. While my Almost True News site is still moving slowly, my newest blog about Spike TV’s Blade: The Series is doing extraordinarily well. If I had launched two or three other blogs a few months back, this network would have a little more weight behind it and hopefully a bit more momentum. Luckily, I’ve learned from that mistake and I’ve started doing these smaller sites alongside my larger projects so that I’m able to launch a new blog once in awhile.

Now, some of you may be wondering if I’ll get back to what I said about the future, thinking that maybe I forgot. Well, I didn’t forget smarty pants. You see, one of the big things I would have changed about my blog is that I would have made a nice catchy logo for it. The blog was really an experiment at that time, so I can’t really blame myself for that. I can, however, blame myself for not making a logo these last few months. Heck, I’m writing this post talking about it and I still have no plans on doing it. With the many projects I’ve lined up for myself, making a logo for an existing site just seems to be low priority. Sure, I could go about hiring somebody to do it for me, but I’m the kind of person that likes doing things myself if I can.

Yet another thing I wish I had done differently (that I’ve still not done) would be to make the design completely functional in FireFox. I use IE and design for IE (designers everywhere are probably cursing at me now). The reason I do it that way is because most of the internet population still uses IE, so that’s who I design for. That’s no excuse to make a site not work completely in FireFox though. To this day the site looks a little different in each browser. I even have two different stylesheets, one for IE, one for FireFox. If you know anything about websites and design, you know how bad that is.

So, I guess I’ve rambled quite a bit here so I think I’ll start winding down. Hopefully at least one or two of you out there found some of that interesting and/or useful. I have no regrets with how I did things, and since I’m still a beginner to this whole thing, I figure there will be many more things I’ll look back on and wish I would have done differently. Let’s just hope there won’t be anything major.