Its pretty but is it dull and slow

[kingjacob]

I have had DigitalOrder running for a few months and the code is 100% valid yet for some reason it loads unbearablely slow even on fast connections. I would greatly appreciate a

Blog:DigitalORDER (http://digitalorder.org)
Goals: for DO I blog to keep myself up to date on whats going on online so I can be a better sponsor to my bloggers.
Design Goals:simple, clean, fast but not bare
Audience: individual bloggers, though Im trying to move the content into a bit more corporate business's and marketing.
Other: I like the design for the most part, I just feel somethings missing and its too slow.

Thank You ahead of time for the review

[pbradish]

Hey Jacob,

It looks like you have a solid start. The blog loaded up quickly for me but I didn't run any sort of bandwidth or host test. Google "website speed test" and you'll find a couple of useful tools for this.

So... on the the blog, I have a couple of tips for you:

The first is your page title.

I grabbed this from your about page:

"DigitalORDER is a blog about Computers, the Internet, Business and all things inbetween."

Now, the page title simply states "DigitalORDER" which really doesn't tell us or the search engines anything about what the blog is trying to accomplish. I would try to incorporate some sort of long tail keyword (I wrote (http://www.epursuit.net/blog/why-long-tail-title-tags-are-so-important/) a blog entry about exactly this earlier today) into your title. Search engines put plenty of weight on your page title, so make sure that each one is unique, content specific, and to the point (3-7 words).

Second is the advertisements.

I noticed that each advertisement seems to have a dotted border around it. This is OK in the sense that people will notice the ad, but I've always found ads to be much more successful when blended into the design.

Just my .02 of constructive criticism. I'm new to blogging (come from ecommerce background) and mine is by no means perfect, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

[kingjacob]

I just found out about the all in on seo plugin, so that'll help out with the titles and as for the dots, the css borders all img's in the dotted border but youre right not all ads work best with a dotted border and its not difficult to make a img2 class. Thanks for the advice.

[shyflower]

One of the reasons for the slow load could be your graphic sizes. One of your comics is 145kb and that's just too big. You need to optimize them for the best presentation at the lowest size.

[goldfries]

looks nice.

i personally would
1. reduce the ads
2. have narrower border between the boxes.
3. excerpt the posts to faster loading
4. reduce # of post per page.

[kingjacob]

looks nice.

i personally would
1. reduce the ads
2. have narrower border between the boxes.
3. excerpt the posts to faster loading
4. reduce # of post per page.

You really think 3 ads is too much, :confused: there arent even any ads above the fold.
I dont think Itll do good to reduce the number of posts but it probally wont hurt to excerpt posts once they hit the bottom 3 on the front page.

[smittenbite]

i dont think the ads are too much. maybe try to move the 2nd ad underneath the 3rd post intead of the 2nd post showing. right now it might seem like a lot because the 2nd post has a big banner ad on the top and bottom of it.

[goldfries]

Jacob, it's just my personal preference. :) Don't worry about it.

your choice of ads are still better than having a huge square google adsense right smack in the middle of the content.