A look into the future of made in costa rica
by Josue Salazar
I started this blog last year, i had modified the famous Kubrick design with a picture of two birds, and a nice color scheme, which looked pretty nice, and everyone liked. Though what most people noticed was that my blog was running on Movable Type, and Kubrick was a WordPress theme. So, i decided to create a how to port it to MT article (with some help). After i created it, i was linked by Michael Heilemann from the Kubrick homepage, and overnight it became a hit. A lot of people found the article useful, and it brought me thousands of visitors and hundreds of readers. It was great. But, my old blog went offline in april this year, i lost the content, and i stayed off the internet for a few months. Everything died, Kubrick was replaced by K2, and all my visitors were gone.
I finally came back online around september of this year, and brought back my blog, with a new domain, but since i had lost my content, i started off with a basic K2/WordPress installation. A few months have passed, and i finally sat down and re did the design. What you’re looking at now is basically the same theme i had when this blog started, over a year ago.
It’s pretty much the same design, same header image/logo, same colors. But, i’ve added images, and some other things in it to make the site look nice. The old design looked a bit plain. So, i’m back where i started.
I don’t have the Kubrick on MT article anymore, and i found no need to do it again. I’m not getting that many visitors right now, but the reader base is slowly growing. Recently i wrote an article explaining how to buy songs on iTunes US from anywhere in the world with PayPal, which has seen a good response. And so, i will now be focusing on creating articles explaining how to do certain things, which will hopefully bring in more readers. Content is the most important thing you can add to your site.
I have setup Adsense, hopefully i’ll be earning something with it. But that’s not the idea, i want to publish and have my material read by as many people as possible. I would love to write about the TV shows i watch, i’m a huge TV fan, and i believe that’s something i can write a lot about. I also want to publish more about my lovely country, Costa Rica. I travel a lot, and take a lot of pictures, the idea is to blog about each trip, kind of like a travel blog. Time will tell if people like that.
Basically, i want more readers, to write more, and well, make some money.
If you happen to have any suggestions on how to improve the site, or ideas on what kind of content i should add, feel free to post a comment.
Happy Holidays.
While content is critical, something to get people talking and visiting IS a cool design. While K2 is an excellent design, it is overdone and un-unique now.
of course, my site is a horrible example and I can’t talk, since I ought to be learning all this CSS / XHTML stuff and integrating with ease.
K2 and Kubrick are both too common, i agree. But i see it this way, they’re pretty damn good. Honestly, if i were to come up with a different design for my blog, i would fail.
I chose to edit it a bit, and it works. I think people coming here will obviously realize this is just a dressed Kubrick (well, not all will figure that out) (and i’m not trying to fool anyone), but would not mind, since i’m no designer, and this is not a Web 2.0 blog.
[...] Since a few friends asked me what was going on with the site, I’ll explain. I’ve had one design for about 2 years now, the one with the orange background and birds on the header. If you want to read more about that design, head on over to this post. [...]