October 22, 2002
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GETTING STARTED
Last week, Monsur noticed something interesting: a bunch of users weren’t making it through our start wizard to their first post!
It probably had something to do with the fact that our start wizard was four-steps long. Also, we had some steps in there to check out URLs and premium – which probably scared some users off.
So… we took ‘em out (well, Marc and Monsur did). You can always check out Personal URLs or Premium later, once you’ve started blogging. And now that our start wizard is so much shorter, the odds of you doing that should be much higher!
What about you: was there any one thing in particular that scared you about getting started with your blog?
Comments (24)
hm… there are also people who signed up jsut to give comment.. and not really blogging.. so take those into account… another suggestion is take them to their blog with default setting asap, with a msg on the top for them to edit look and feel?
Yep – that no one would ever come to my site…The initial sign-up didn’t scare me…but wondering if I would “make friends” did… RoseMary
My fear was that I’d put my work on someone else’s server somewhere and, without warning, in some not-too-distant future, it’d all vanish overnight.
You guys seem pretty solid, tho.
I’m so fickle about appearance and such… I didn’t wanna go through choosing all of that right away.
I feared I would never be able to live up to the high standards of ethical blogging that Bianca Broussard (the Great Bianca) had set for all of us. Was I wrong?!
Fear of grammatical errors, misspellings, dreaded TYPOS! And of course, fear of not being good enough. (But I’ve found most everyone, except maybe people who live in the Nile, silly Egyptians, have that same fear of not being good enough)
ps. Any wacky photos of our xanga men in their (big-sized, of course) bowling shoes?
…none that I can think of, thought the wizard did a great job in getting me started.
MuSe
I feared being misunderstood and offending people, but that just goes with any form of communication.
Dang, NFP beat me to it…
Yes—my brain!LOL Shelley
And then again, it could have been…..oh my goodness, yes!
My brain!!!
~Shelley
I was a little put off by the trickster Bianca for the way xanga came to my attention, but it was easy enough to get started and I was hooked the first time my browser stepped foot in xanga’s door. Been blogging my brains out nearly every day since and loving it.
My low self esteem and lower IQ held me back for a while, but my love for Bianca won out.
Pete
Nope….jumped right in with both feet. I guess I was intrigued by it. Had been with Blogger before that but wasn’t web savvy enough at the time to do what I really wanted. Its much easier to get started here at Xanga…and the community aspect is really really great.
I remember the process as utterly painless.
what VM said ^^^
at least signing up was painless…
*Echoes Forsberg* ~ there was so much pressure, so fast, to have a pretty place!! Most of us have no clue of html when we start out, or what we want the blog to be about.. I think scrapping that process is a good move
Hmmmmm… I wasn’t really scared. I joined up to leave a comment for a friend. Everything seemed pretty simple.. cut and dry to me.
) Well.. I did fear random attacks by hobos.. but hey.. you get there EVERYWHERE on the net. ;o)
signing up wasn’t difficult or scary at all –
the first time I clicked “new weblog entry” and the little empty white box appeared I had to fight the urge to go running, screaming into the hills.
The set-up stages were easy to do;the only problem I had was that I happened to sign up at a time when the site was really slow,but once I found out from a friend who already had a Xanga that the servers were being fixed and that it wasn’t usually like this,I was happy.
Ya know what I really, really dislike about Xanga? eProps. Grr!! I don’t give ‘em and I hate to get ‘em.
This shouldn’t be a popularity contest (Featured Content?? What’s up with that???), but that’s what it feels like. I hate being judged by strangers for what I write in my journal. At the same time, I hate feeling like I have to judge someone for what they write. So I stopped giving eProps. Only thing is, people think I’m being rude or dissing them if I don’t join in the so-called fun. bleh! Hate eProps!!! Hate them!!!
nothing screwed me up, actually twas quite easy
nothing at all…but then again.. i”m a bit massochistic
I’ve noticed that a lot of people just sign up for the blogs with no intention of ever blogging. They’ll put up one post signifying that they aren’t going to blog, they’re just using it for commenting purposes. Perhaps there could be a guest option for replying to posts.