I’ve been working in television for years and I absolutely adore my job.

On a daily basis, I’m surrounded by promotion, marketing, graphics and more crucial elements needed to pull off successful live shows.

I applied one big television lesson when this blog first began three years ago.  In our shows, every segment is packaged with unique graphics and specific formats.  That was the birth of the 620×300 pixel banners I designed to kick start every post I write.  I wanted readers to be able to scroll and instantly recognize the types of posts they liked to read.

These banners have evolved as my knowledge of Photoshop increased but lately, I’ve been heavily influenced by new graphics I see during sporting events.  I’m also a big fan of CNN show packaging and the design of their promos.

I want to raise the bar when it comes to how I package this blog.  So I’ve attempted techniques I’ve never tried before.  So far, I’ve come up with some pretty interesting stuff.  Then I thought about animating some of them.  This was my first attempt:

It’s amazing how much you can learn about After Effects and Photoshop when you see something on television and give it a shot.

Beyond graphics, I want to start making better use of the promotional tools at my disposal.  So I reworked the amount of ADs I display, I’ve created new ones and I’ve got a better strategy for inter-linking my posts.

Television shows can make statements like “Coming up next…”  Why can’t blogs?

That idea was the genesis of my new posting schedule.  Instead of posting 6 new articles a week, I’ll be posting 3.  On one hand, it gives me more opportunities to work on my screenwriting.  On the other, it’s an opportunity to structure this blog a little better so post topics don’t seem so random.

Later, I also hope to include more custom graphics within specific posts.  We just got a new camera and I’m very excited to snap some new images and see what I can do with them in Photoshop.  I’m hoping that more and more posts will have supporting graphics throughout the content and not just a title graphic.

All of this has been fairly easy to implement thus far, I just hope the result is a better blog that looks good.  I suppose my main concern is overdoing it.  I don’t want the graphics to become a distraction after all.  We’ll see.

A COMMERCIAL BREAK FOR BLOGS

Earlier, I talked about how working in television has influenced my blogging past time. While I was taking time away from this site, I started thinking about ways to implement the things I’ve learned in the TV world. Obviously, you can’t make a blog a television show but there are certain fundamentals that you can apply.

Like a commercial break? Clicked is a new feature on The Athletic Nerd that will promote posts either from this blog or other interesting places around the web.

In order to make this work, I had to increase the number of posts per page to 7. (Up from 5) I did this so I could update the ‘Clicked’ post and it would stay on the front page for two weeks.

The plan is to continually update the post and raise it to the top to effectively promote the best content I can come up with/find.

Have a site or a post you’d like to see featured on either The Post or Clicked? Email me at jason@17west.ca

It’s good to be back.