Let's continue with the Craig's Clicks series, but let's switch to looking at blog signatures. (if you've missed the series so far, click the link to go back and catch up). Gold stars from me will go to good examples in blog presentation in three areas: Blog Theme (banner and background), Blog Signature, and Blog Profile. By highlighting good examples in this way, I hope to inspire others with ideas to update their own blog presentations.
I'm looking at the presentation of you in the virtual world. If your presentation is attractive to the eye, engaging, tells a concise story about you to someone who has never met or seen you before then you will get my attention too.
These next three stars are also going out based on the blog signatures. I have written a whole series on creating blog signatures (you can go back via that link). In summary, the signature closes out your article with a brief synopsis of who you are and what you do and includes calls to action to capture a person's further interest
The next three gold stars go to...
Barbara has in her signature what I call a personality pose. I LIKE these and I wrote about that some in my article Importance of Portraits in a Virtual World. I like signatures that have a photo or graphic of some kind to offset what would otherwise be all text. The photo may be of you, your work, your area, or some other interesting visual that relates to what you do. We quickly lose interest without visuals. It keeps our eye tuned to the area and perhaps there is a better chance of what text is written will be read. I like the fact that Barbara doesn't just repeat the same portrait that she has as her profile photo. This is more interesting.
Barbara had already worked on the aspects of the signature that I've been highlighting in my blog series on the topic and had done a very good job. When I came across it, I had an idea to make it stand out just a little more. Above-right is how her signature looked. I was thinking how much I liked the personality pose she had used and thought it was just being a little under-used. I enlarged it and merged it into the banner background for the footer (uh oh, I used an advanced technique to do that, I know you are going to say "how did he do that?" - well that is an advanced topic and definitely another story)
In any case, the finished work is below. I'm very happy with how it came out!
Debra Walsh
I worked with Debbie on her updated signature for my
signature makeover blog
post. We worked on tightening up the large vertical signature she had to one
more compact with some new visuals. We downloaded and added the social
media icon stars which links to her pages. This was a collaborative effort
with me and she was a good student so she surely deserves a star :) and it
serves as a good example for others looking for ideas!
Michele Miller
I also worked with Michele on her blog signature. Michele was also a good
student who learned about tables in HTML and we made her signature more
compact in the vertical sense.
Tables in HTML allow you to put information into cells and work
horizontally across a page in blocks. She too gets a star and her signature also
serves as an example to get ideas from. I also like how she added her
handwritten
name to the signature.
I'm out there scouting all the time for more signatures to highlight
with gold stars.
Will yours be next?
(PS - as you can see, if your signature is pretty close but might just need a
pinch of this or dash of that, I may just reach out to you with some ideas)
And I want to start giving gold stars to profile pages... but honestly I'm seeing so many profile pages as just a wall of words. That's not going to work for me! You add photos to your blog posts, why are you ignoring your profile pages?
