I have a passion for information. If I don’t know what something is, how something is made, how to use it … I look it up on the internet. I am regularly looking for tutorials on how to set something, do something, change something and have gradually become more and more irritated by the regurgitated, barely changed, obviously plagiarized drivel. Don’t get me wrong (love that statement – it means so much more) there is heaps and heaps of really good information written by brilliant, knowledgeable people with a desire to help, inform, educate and/or entertain and they do it very well. I am fed up with the copy and paste journalists and the pad it out bunch who need you to stay on their page so they can achieve good average page view times. They start with a Dramatic Headline, pad it out with useless back story, throw in a heap of mindless links and try to make the “Ideal Blog Length” before you finally discover the information the Dramatic Headline is promising you is three lines of mindless tosh that you knew anyway, or they are putting a half heard half truth with something they read on another blog and think they could be an investigative journalist without doing the work!
Oops, new paragraph. I was looking for the “Ideal Blog Length” and discovered some research (that was a link) that said the average paragraph should be three sentences and the average sentence 25 words. I had better get counting!
I am a web designer – another thought popped into my head, I am a capital letter lover, always keen to use a capital when I should probably stick to lower case, but I digress. I am a web designer who started in the days when you needed to know Html and Css. I know there are many who were there at the beginning but I popped in relatively early on. Now, with WordPress and other CMS’, I find that everyone is claiming to be a designer. They grab a theme and battle the site to fit resulting in strange blocks of random text, blocks with “I am a text block” or “insert image here”. Testimonials no-one reads and screeds of bluesky thinking, holistic approach nonsense. I have had to maintain a couple of these sites in the past. What a nightmare.
So, to all would be bloggers out there. Please make sure you have something to say of your own, don’t rehash another person’s work and to the web designers, a theme does not make you a designer!