NolanDalla.Com is live
My friend Nolan Dalla asked me to help him creating his blog. I know Nolan as a writer of poker and sports betting advice and great travel reports. His rants are a work of art and he is open to state political opinions.
Within a few days of moving things around and discussing features of the blog, we came up with this layout. It is using WordPress together with the Trim theme by Elegant Themes. We did some tweaks to modify the color scheme and add a few buttons. We’ve also added a Twitter integration to get the word out when new articles appear. We picked Westhost as hosting provider, but had to use a different domain registrar since the domain was in existance before we started the project. Some tutoring in the general use of WordPress and some search engine optimization (SEO) advice is part of the package.
Update: August 2012
Some time has gone by and the blog took off very well, due to Nolan’s writing prowess and the fact that he is well known among his peers. Within 2 weeks the number of followers on twitter went from 20 to now 550. Those twitter followers drop by regularly to read their daily essay. We had to make some changes, like going from black background to white background, since many readers complained about it. It seems to be a common enough problem to consider it when deciding on a color scheme for a blog or a web page. Here’s another screenshot.
Update: January 2014
It’s been a while. We have been updating the theme, changing out some images. Adding and removing plugins, for instance adding social media buttons. Some SEO measures were taken as well. The site is doing well. Nolan is adding content almost daily. He got a couple of shares on facebook that send the visitor numbers through the roof and some of his articles got linked by news outlets. The higher traffic volume made me take a hard look at the overall performance, but aside from a few tweaks, no major changes in the configuration or hosting plan were necessary. Here’s another screenshot:
