Need advice for development of geoland

Sometimes the simplest things are very difficult to decide on

take a look if you want http://geoland.org

I want it to be a blog about things I develop or find or News.
I want to talk about the work I do (like websites for clients, what I did maybe, what design and marketing was done)
I want to have guest bloggers (specialists on their fields)

But I want it to keep it proffessional and yet friendly (hence the picture of the friendly girls ;))

Am I going completelly in the wrong direction to want to do that ?
Can they all fit together ? or Am I crazy ?
I have a gut feeling that maybe they don't fit, and that is the reason I need a friendly yet serious advice.
Should I be thinking about a seperate website for work ?
(but I am ranking well for things like "Greece web design" and related terms  :( - not that that there is a lot of demand  ;D )

You have to remember that I just began blogging with geoland 3 months ago and with the blogspot blog 4 months ago (no previous experience) even posting on the forums I began maybe 5 months ago

Any thoughts would be most welcome.

I think I have some similar task:

on my homepage (finalwebsites.com) there is a dutch part with my business information and also some information for dutch web developer)

on the other site there is a part with open source content and also affiliation pages, sure all together are very mixed and maybe I should isolate my company information into another site. (but I like to have this good serps because of the OS content)

my weblog is different, this is our information about one item: web development

I think its like a magazine: multi threated, keep interesting for the reader and don't write about times which are not related. At the moment I write also reviews for third parties. I think this is OK since the reviews are related to the blogs subject.

Just think that you are the reader while reading you blog posts and if this feels good you're fine...

Your blog's goal looks realistic to me.

I guess you should start by trackback other blogs or leave comments (with your url attached)

As both of your blogs are about web design/development, you can do something from these to bring in more traffic :

1) Write a wordpress plugin (have some results)
2) Design an open source design (submit to oswd.org) or a wp theme
3) Create an open source class or small project and post it to phpclasses and freshmeat

I think these can give a boost, but you should always keep on writing new content to your blog. Otherwise nothing of those will help.

So if I understand correctly

its ok to have
blog + professional work + guest bloggers
on the same site ?!

That was actually something I was not sure about

Nick, he is talking about customer projects,

Giorgos, just don't write about your customer projects, write related tutorials instead (thats much better for traffic)

there is no problem to have on your blog website a page about your service...

OK olaf I see it makes sense suddenly

Thanks

Yes and I saw you posted some life style related stuff, don't do that :)

Yes and I saw you posted some life style related stuff, don't do that :)

Life style ? you mean the banner image ?
I took everything life style related out ?
can you confirm ?

sorry I'm wrong I thought I saw yesterday some non webdev topics.

btw. you should change the page titles a little, it looks like that google doesn't see the content page's as the most important part (try the "site" command)

hmmm its not the title look more the way how Google has indexed your blog, do you use a sitemap?

I think the titles are OK Olaf but,
I realized that google gives geoland the description from DMOZ which is very generic description 
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Ageoland.org&btnG=Search

did not know google was relying so much on DMOZ's description ?
I thought it was picking something from withing the website for description ?


About the sitemap I have the sitemap plugin enabled ? Google reports that it sees it - and looking in it seems OK

Anyway I can't stress about it since I can't change the google algo :)

Thanks for looking into this Olaf I appreciate it

use this meta tag for dmoz (here is also a thread about this tag)

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp">

do you submitted the sitemap to the "Google Webmaster Tools"?

otherwise you need to add this info to your robots.txt

Sitemap: http://www.geoland.org/sitemap.php (or whatever)
the last one is new and should be added to all robits.txt files, check http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/04/whats-new-with-sitemapsorg.html

About DMOZ its not a question of indexing it, its already included in DMOZ

Yes I have been using the webmasters tools and google sees the sitemap OK

The problem is google is describing my site using the DMOZ's descriptiong which is pretty generic and it sucks but anyway ...

the extra attribute is to disable the use of the ODP description and title

Ohh I see you never linked the related article as you said ;)
I am going to look into it

sorry for the misunderstanding (search for noodp) :)

In general I think it is ok to post some unrelated stuff in a blog. At least if you don't have time to post something on the subject you can make a post about your weekend, but not over do it.

I guess you do it that is why you approve of it ?  ???

It depends on the blog. at payment blogger I don't because it is a blog with a very specific objective. On other blogs I have done it, as blogs suppose to be around one person. So you can write whatever you like, but keep some subject too.

OK I did some changes on background colors

and the banner if anybody want to take a look I would appreciate it
http://geoland.org (please comment on the banner - but remember I am not a photoshop guru ;)

on the other hand a friend created this http://geoland.org/wp-content/themes/geoland/img/geoland.jpg
but I am not sure I like it more than mine  >:( (please advise)

hehe, remember: sometimes is less more ;)

I learned for us non designer it is very difficult to work with photo's in web designs :9

I think your friend's header graphic looks better than the one you are using right now

I think I prefer is but both look good ;)

Thanks Tim for trying to make me feel good about my photoshop skills ;)
Thanks both for the review