How My Fan Mail Can Serve As A Motivator To You (Plus Some Insight On How I Designed Blogussion)

Last week, I received a great email pretty much prais­ing Blo­gus­sion for every­thing that it is. In the mes­sage (which I will post below), I not only received com­ments towards the blog, but was asked some ques­tions about some of the things I did here, which I will also cover in this post.

The email mes­sage came from a now fre­quent Blo­gus­sion user, Nick Tart of Junior­Biz, and I think that my blog has really made an impact on him and his site. I’ll let you read his mes­sage (which he agreed to let me post here) and you can decide on our impact on him.

As well as answer­ing his ques­tions, I want to go a lit­tle more in depth of how this email can inspire you as well to really take pride in your blog. So here is his email:

Hi Alex,

My name is Nick Tart and I have spent about 8 of the last 16 hours on Blogussion.com (I live in Long­mont, CO if you want to check Ana­lyt­ics). It sucks! I am get­ting noth­ing done and it is com­pletely your fault. I can’t explain it. For what­ever rea­son, I have become addicted to read­ing arti­cles on your and Janith’s site. What is the cure?

Hon­estly man, you have done an incred­i­ble job with the con­tent, inter­face and usabil­ity of the site. It’s weird, I have never found a web­site that I have wanted to stay on for so long. I’m not even that inter­ested in blog­ging! At least I didn’t think I was. I would con­sider a total waste of time (con­sid­er­ing every­thing I was sup­posed to do today), but I have learned a lot. To the point that I am going to con­sider it to be a free education.

I have enjoyed Blogussion.com so much that I am con­sid­er­ing com­pletely rebuild­ing my own site, http://juniorbiz.com. I debated for the longest time whether to build my site with Word­Press or Joomla and even­tu­ally set­tled on Joomla. After see­ing your site, I am regret­ting it. I have never seen a Joomla site look as nice as yours. In fact, I can’t think of any sites that I pre­fer aes­thet­i­cally over Blogussion.com. I under­stand that a lot of time and cus­tomiza­tion went into con­fig­ur­ing your theme, but I am won­der­ing about exactly how you did it.

Did you start from scratch or did you start with a basic Word­Press theme and adjust it to fit your fancy? If so, what was the base WP theme? Did you already know how to do all of the cus­tomiza­tion or did you learn as you went? How long do you think it would take some­one with lit­tle WP knowl­edge and even less WP The­sis knowl­edge to build a theme like Blogussion’s?

On another note, I don’t think you and Janith play up the fact that you are 15 and 16 enough. It’s amaz­ing what you have done, espe­cially at your age. I’m par­tic­u­larly impressed that Michael Dun­lop paid you for a review. What he’s done is also incredible.

Thanks,
Nick

P.S. I pre­dict Blo­gus­sion will be in the Alexa Top 10,000 by the end of the year.

That email was the nicest email I have ever received regard­ing Blo­gus­sion! The things he men­tioned in there made me feel really accom­plished about what I have been doing on this blog, and that feel­ing of accom­plish­ment only encour­ages me to do more.

Let’s Dig A Lit­tle Deeper

Alright, so here I have this amaz­ingly inspir­ing email prais­ing the blog here. This email was so pow­er­ful and so moti­vat­ing that I feel like if I were to just show you guys what peo­ple have to say about me and not let you in on how you can get ideas from my com­ments, then I would be a lit­tle greedy!

The Knowl­edge I Gained That You Can Get From Your Own Fan Mail

Believe it or not, I learned a thing or two from this mes­sage. From any fan mail you receive about your blog, you should have learned some­thing from it. If you don’t, then I feel like you missed the point of the entire message.

The things I learned specif­i­cally were:

• I am an inspi­ra­tion to some­one - I have always been think­ing that I am just another blog­ger dish­ing out arti­cles on a daily basis, but here I get this email from some­one who has totally changed their per­spec­tive on some­thing they didn’t have any inter­est in before they got to my blog. That’s just an absolutely amaz­ing accom­plish­ment on my part.
• I received feed­back - The mes­sage had a lot of feed­back — pos­i­tive feed­back. The com­ments made towards my blog showed me that I was doing some­thing right, and in that regards, my con­tent and design met and exceeded their expec­ta­tions. That tells me to keep doing what I’m doing.
• By impress­ing peo­ple, you are more likely to cre­ate last­ing rela­tion­ships - I have a feel­ing that Nick is going to be around here for a while, and the things that he already does in this com­mu­nity, and the com­mu­nity at my other blog are really show­ing a sign of friend­ship between Nick, myself, Janith, and the rest of the com­mu­nity here.

We all get fan mes­sages, even if it’s not in the form of an email. They can even be in blog com­ments too. You get them every time you pub­lish a post to your blog, and they’re usu­ally the com­ments you don’t par­tic­u­larly like all of the time — “Nice Post!”

Just check through your blog or email inbox every so often and read any com­ments directed at you and your blog. Try to see the real pic­ture behind what they are try­ing to say, even if it doesn’t come out as its exact meaning.

The Things I Need To Do Now

Because there have been so many pos­i­tive things said in this mes­sage, I have decided that there are two tasks I need to do now. The first task is to work as hard as pos­si­ble to get more peo­ple think­ing the way Nick did about my blog, and two, keep­ing his cur­rent com­ments true and alive.

If I am going to build a good read­er­ship on my blog, the one way to do that is to have the major­ity of the peo­ple who visit the blog have these same thoughts as Nick did in his email. His com­ments showed me that I have done that for him, and he serves as proof of my progress in achiev­ing that good readership.

Keep­ing His Thoughts Alive

From his mes­sage, I gath­ered that he loved the con­tent here, and he liked the inter­face and usabil­ity of the design. By read­ing our con­tent for eight hours (woah) that tells me that a good flow of qual­ity con­tent has been posted here over and over again.

His par­tic­u­lar inter­est in the design here also says that it’s what com­pels the read­ers here to stay around for that extra time to search out the con­tent because it is eas­ily nav­i­ga­ble and appeal­ing to the eye.

Those two things are with­out a doubt the most cru­cial things to get right on my blog, and accord­ing to one of my read­ers, that’s what is right here. As long as I can under­stand that peo­ple like what is being done, I can stick with it and even make it better.

Bonus: The Answer’s to Nick’s Design Questions

I promised him in my reply that I would answer the ques­tions he sent in a blog post, so here they are for any­one else who is inter­ested. These are all ques­tions regard­ing the design of the blog, which is some­thing he put the most empha­sis on in his email about what he liked about the blog.

1. Did you start from scratch or did you start with a basic Word­Press theme and adjust it to fit your fancy? If so, what was the base WP theme?

In my design process, I first write down every­thing I want my design to have. That’s all of the stuff in my header to footer or every last fea­ture I can think of. As I go along, I can add/modify/remove some of those things, but I always like to start off with a basic of idea of what’s going to go onto the blog, which really helps com­ing up with the design layout.

Once I have a list of the things I want on my blog, I start fig­ur­ing out some design aspects. Stuff like col­ors, num­ber of columns, fixed or fluid lay­out, etc. I can get to work in Pho­to­shop. Yes, I am for­tu­nate to own a copy of that expen­sive piece of soft­ware, but if you are com­pletely seri­ous about your design, then I totally rec­om­mend you get it if you can afford it!

I used to just code themes from a blank page (that’s what the first ver­sion of this theme was, all code from scratch), until I started, as you already know, using the The­sis frame­work. I can’t believe how sim­ple The­sis made cod­ing a theme like this was. If you can dish out the $87.00 for it, then absolutely buy it.

2. Did you already know how to do all of the cus­tomiza­tion or did you learn as you went?

The cus­tomiza­tions you see on this cur­rent design now are based off of cus­tomiza­tions made on the last theme here, which as I said above, was made from scratch. The cus­tomiza­tions from my first theme came from about two years of cod­ing and designing.

As you go on cus­tomiz­ing and updat­ing your design for a while, you will learn how to improve your skills and keep improv­ing your blog. I’d say that cre­at­ing the Blo­gus­sion theme has opened my eyes to more advanced HTML and CSS tricks, and has even got­ten me learn­ing the basics of PHP.

3. How long do you think it would take some­one with lit­tle Word­Press knowl­edge and even less The­sis knowl­edge to build a theme like Blogussion’s?

Believe it or not, this theme really isn’t that com­pli­cated. It may look the part because of how dif­fer­ent it looks from The­sis, but the code behind it is just really simple.

As much as you hear it, Word­Press is easy to use. It’s ridicu­lous how many resources there are out there for Word­Press, and the major­ity of those tuto­ri­als talk about its cus­tomiza­tion. Search the web for any­thing Word­Press related, and I can almost guar­an­tee you that there is a tuto­r­ial or plu­gin for any­thing you want to do on your blog.

As for The­sis, it can be hard to under­stand for some at first because it doesn’t use the nor­mal cod­ing style as other Word­Press themes do. How­ever, if you can learn how to use The­sis, even a lit­tle, you can build an amaz­ing theme. Just check out The­sis from the link to it above and you will under­stand this much better.

Photo by Ilbrahim Iujaz

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