New Blog Site; Looking for Feedback
 

Hello everyone. As some of you have probably seen, I have a small blog I use to document my car stuff. I was forced recently to move my blog to a new host. I was originally using Weebly, which is for n00bs, and was rather easy to use. I am now using WordPress, which is definitely better, but also more complicated. As I know nothing regarding HTML, CSS, or web development in general, this has been a challenge to me.

I figured I'd share the new site with you guys because a.) I think it turned out rather nicely, and b.) I would like feedback from people who might know more than I do about this stuff. I've only looked at it using Chrome on Windows, so there might be other browsers that render stuff differently or something. There are plenty of things I still need to work on (and some stuff doesn't render properly on mobile right now).

Anyway, just looking for any feedback that might help me improve things!

http://www.seriesblueadventures.com/

Hey man i REALLY like the layout and the site. I'll be following along. I like all the photos as well. Definitely have some great stuff going along. I'm kinda doing the same but doing it all on Youtube.

I like it!

It's simple and laid out well. Good job!

I really like the new layout. Keep the updates coming.

Love the site. That's some solid WordPress. Is that a commercial theme? Makes me want to dust off my ancient abandoned website (that I still pay for domain redirection on...).

More importantly and personally though (because anyone can apply an existing theme template), the photography looks excellent. I look forward to seeing and reading more!

Keep up the good work.

Yes, it's a theme called Kameleon. I would have had no idea how to do it on my own. I'm not 100% happy with it. Two things that annoy me are a.) no matter what I do I can't get YouTube embeds to size exactly right, and b.) you can't click on the featured image to see a higher resolution version (and it compresses the featured image pretty poorly.)

I appreciate all the kind words!

Question for someone who might know. You'll notice there is a few seconds of lag after each click on my site before the next page loads. It just sits there waiting for a server response. People keep telling me (including BlueHost themselves) that I need to "optimize the site" to get it to load faster.

But I don't think they're understanding my issue. The site itself loads very quickly... once the server responds. Am I missing something? It seems more like an issue with my host (BlueHost) than with my site itself. Any thoughts?

I've had a few clients host sites at Bluehost, and to be quite honest, I've never really been all that happy with them. All of their sites are similarly slow to respond, though one is compounded by the complex WordPress setup we needed to implement (basically loads 5 sites at once, basically every time you navigate around). Bluehost is cheap though, but in a way you get what you pay for. I wouldn't say performance is horrible on your site, but sure, it isn't "instant". It's acceptable, but could be better. You might want to look into your DNS routing to see if it's making some unnecessary hops, but I'd guess it's probably just being on a shared Bluehost WP server.

Optimize is a fairly ambiguous term. Would help if they were more specific. You could do several things, like reduce the file sizes of your images (increase compression, or reduce color depth). Consider tweaking your layout a little to have fewer images and less widgets perhaps. You coudl also look into changing the way the page loads to rely on caching more since you are likely calling the same JavaScript objects a lot.

Try running your site through one (or more) of the dozens of web page analyzer tools to get some feedback on it. Here's a quick analysis from Google Developer Tools: https://developers.google.com/speed/...2F&tab=desktop

As for your YouTube embed sizing issue, it looks like the width and height of your embed are wrong. Not sure if you entered that or if your WP changed it to be the max width of your content column, but it is listed in the code as 640x390, when YouTube's default embed code for that video is 560x315 (which is a proper 16:9 aspect ratio). Try changing it by hand and see if that works.

I did install a plugin called ShortPixel to compress my images. It reduced the total from 1.3 Gb to 250 Mb, though admittedly the compression is perhaps a bit higher than I'd have liked as some images don't look all that great anymore.

Beyond that, you're basically speaking in tongues to me, as I don't really know enough about that stuff to even begin do tackle those sorts of changes... yet.

That does sound like the issue. However, my unfamiliarity with all of this means I can't even find that damned piece of code in my files. I've looked through the editor and cannot find the page that has that bit of code anywhere. Originally, the embeds were even narrower, but I was able to tweak this bit of code in the stylesheet CSS page to get it to where it is now:

I basically pulled the ".single-post-data iframe" out into its own statement and eliminated the height: auto statement. That made the embed taller to its current size, but that's all I've been able to find so far.

Looks awesome

I thought I'd follow up on this. Turned out Kameleon, while appearing fancy, was apparently a mess of a theme. It was heavily dependent on several plugins, and nothing seemed to play nice with anything else. So I simply started over with an entirely different theme, and the site is MUCH faster now. It also solved some of my other issues, such as my YouTube embed size issue :)

Looks good. Keep up the good work.

I love it. Nice and Simple. My only nitpick and I mean I'm really nitpicking is Bold the title of each and every new blog.

I'll need to find the CSS information that allows me to do that, but the theme at least allowed me to bump the blog post title font size up from 20 to 35. I agree it needed to stand out more :)