Things That Are Missing

While searching your blogs and reading all the great stuff you post, I find that some very very important things are missing. I thought I’d list them here so you can be sure everyone sees what you want them to see. (Some of this information may only apply to WordPress blogs.)

Your link on your Gravatar: This link is important, but it takes a bit of clicking to find where to put it. I’m surprised how few people have their blog site linked back to their Gravatar image. When you comment and when you are listed under “followers”, it posts your Gravatar and not your blog link UNLESS you put that link in there.

• Here’s how you do it: Click the image at the top right corner of your page next to the little magnifying glass to open your Public Profile. In the second sentence below “My Public Profile” you’ll find a link to gravatar.com. Click that link. You’ll bring up gravatar.com’s profile of you. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do that now. Be sure you have the picture you want and be sure to add your blog address to “My Links”, found on the left.

Your personalized Tag Line: I see a whole lot of blogs with the default tag line, “Just another WordPress.com site.” If you want to appear to be a blogger who knows their stuff, this is the first thing you have to fix. You have to either have no tagline, or write something in there. Really, you do.

• To change your tagline: Go to the “Dashboard” and under the “Settings” option, click “General”. The second line under your Site Title is your Tagline. I think some people haven’t changed it because they have changed Themes and the previous theme didn’t show a tagline. I have had to delete mine with certain themes because they weren’t placed right and covered over other elements of the blog.

A contact email: I can’t think of any reason why you would not have a contact email posted where people could find it. You can set up a separate email address for free on numerous sites to use just for your blog. That way if some weirdo comes along wanting to sell you foreign medications, they don’t have your personal email. If you don’t have your email up there, how can someone contact you to ask to represent your book to publishers, or recruit you to write professionally for their company? I’m not promising that will happen, but if it does, you really want to have that email easy to find. Put it wherever you want, just so we can find it if we want to. Some people recommend posting it as a .jpg instead of text so that spammers can’t copy and paste your email address. I haven’t seen any spam email originating from my WordPress site, so I don’t know if this is necessary.

A way to follow your site if you aren’t on the same blog server: When I like I site, I want to follow it. If it isn’t on WordPress, though, and the author hasn’t put up a way to follow the blog, then I can’t. I might never see your blog again! You may never know that I was there or that I appreciated your site. There are lots of great ways to connect to blogs not on your blog network. One I use is Networked Blogs. (I noticed when I posted this that my Networked Blogs buttons seem to have been bumped off, probably when I last changed themes. Oops!) On Networked Blogs, you can connect to Facebook too. Pretty neat-o!

Those are the biggest offenders. WordPress can be complicated and I really hate all those blank pages in the Dashboard with just a link to a completely different page, or an obscure window to add something unexplained. I’m assuming it is how they transition to a new format, but I never saw the old one so it’s just baffling to me.

Best of fortune in your blogging!