Mimimalist World View

Regular readers (and slightly irregular readers) of this blog will notice that everything has freakin’ changed! Well, you voted for change, right?

Choosing a layout for this site has driven me crazy. When I discovered the single column layout for my WordPress theme, it was like Hosanna! Yeah! FREEDOM!

I’m sure the cleanliness is jarring to the eyeball that is used to seeing the cluster-fritz of the typical blog landing page. Conventional blogging wisdom is about monetization and navigation and I found that pursuing the placement of affiliate links and money links and navigational acrobatics only served up a ton of distractions that make it difficult for me to focus on anything.

I’ve opted to create a mega-clean layout – sort of like a single piece of white letterhead with a single purpose, instead of the back of one of those old piece of crap vans you pull up behind once in a while with 250,o00 stupid bumper stickers from 1974 and the busted tail light hanging on for dear life. And, why is it that these denizens from the dump are nearly always brown?

People who sell their services or need to focus on how they get paid, and not on giving visitors a bunch of ways to leave their site, especially for a Hostgator link. I saw a site the other day where the guy (nameless but you know him) markets to newbies (it’s in the name of the blog) and for some insane reason had big giant Adsense blocks on every page – right on the eye-tracking hot spots to boot!

Why on earth would you want to put contextual advertising on your site – on your home page – that pay a 2 cents a click when you could keep the visitor on your page and get them to optin to your email list – or buy a product that makes you $50? Well, since his mentor was the Adsense guru back in the day…

Okay – back to me.

I’m currently ghostwriting a book for a client this month and then got the flu which turned my brain into sort of a cement mixer only it doesn’t turn ’round – and while I’m talking like Lamb Chop I figured I may as well torture my blog and lo and behold I discovered this awesome layout and then was forced to actually clean up the pages – and then – one time – at band camp – I figured WTF let’s just write a little post at 2am since Red Eye is on and someone may actually come here and gross out over the photo of me in the hot tub.

Hopefully tonight I’ll blow the last of the margarine out of my sinuses (hat tip to Wayne’s World) and be able to get back to writing this really cool book. Then I can put the saddle back on the Stardust Factor and buck up to create the course for professional speakers that is about 8 months pregnant.

If I can breathe then tomorrow night I’ll hook myself up to the Sleep Solutions home study sleep test and get to the bottom of this vexing sleep apnea problem – and hopefully get my life back.

Talk soon!

Rick