I also like to thank Darren and Skellie for providing us this exciting opportunity for helping each other and winning theses fabulous prizes as well.

Firstly, the nav-bar: yes, it probably would be a good idea to remove this, for various reasons. Firstly, it is a good idea to drop the obvious affiliation with Blogger in order to add integrity to your site. Secondly (and in my opinion, more importantly), the nav-bar often will lead readers to “spam” blogs which are hosted by Blogger and are far from desirable to view. Just click on “next blog” a few times and I’m sure you’ll understand my point…

With the nav-bar gone, you may then want to add a search function, which you may easily add as a widget with a quick install.

Customization of Blogger templates isn’t so difficult at all. I have written a few short articles about this on my site, and in the coming weeks have planned a whole series of posts which will explain how to create a unique Blogger template for your blog. There are also many non-standard templates available to Bloggers which you could use as a base and customize yourself.

As Darren said, there are benefits of hosting your own WordPress blog, and indeed I have transferred all posts from a personal blog to this platform from Blogger. But it is a long and often tedious process, especially when you consider the implications of creating a new template, transferring all content, concerns about redirection of posts and many more issues besides.

If you do need any advice or help regarding Blogger, feel free to drop by my blog for advice.

Overall, I find Wife advice to be a great read: witty and well-written despite the complaints of stereotyping. I wish you the best of luck for your blog!

The main thing we’ve learned is that as a landing page, our blog is not clearly communicating our purpose or tone. We are excited to revamp our logo and header; we’ll try to partner with a design company who is interested in using us a case study.

We know that some people don’t understand the humor on our blog. With the feedback we’ve received here, we’ll continue to find and attract those readers who do.

Thanks again!

How exciting to win. I wish Wife Advice good things for 2008.

Happy New Year everyone!

On the subject of Blogger, how do you differentiated between:

Blogger content transfer via FTP to another server.

-verses-

Buying a domain and pointing its host record at the blogspot.com subdoamin?

I would consider the first self hosted and not the second. That said, there is really no way to know if a Blogger blog is self hosted or not unless you do a whois on the domain name and then on the IP address. By the way, Wife Advice resolves to a Google IP address and would fall into the second category above.

I debated a long time about saying anything at all because after all, Problogger isn’t the place to discuss such things. So Darren, if you delete this, I’ll understand.

I might object even more if the relationship is fictional or exaggerated: that would seem to me to encourage dishonesty in couples who might lean that way anyway.

The very first thing I read – about the “present” that was actually a giveaway at a conference – has actually happened to me, with the difference being that I brought it home and said ‘Honey, they gave these away at the conference today – I thought you’d really like it so I brought it home for you!”

That’s an honest relationship: I wasn’t currying favor or trying to impress: I genuinely thought she’d like it, and she did, and appreciated my thinking of her.. lying about motives as that blog seems to suggest really creeps me out..

Anyway, I wanted to say this because nobody should be in a dishonest relationship. If you love someone and they love you, there is not only no need for dishonesty, it is harmful to your future.

Advice from forty plus years of marriage, by the way..