I guess it’s about time for me to shout out about my experience creating an award-winning blog. Yes, you’re currently landing on an award-winning lifestyle blog in Malaysia, IvanYolo.com. It was an honour to have won two awards from MWA by Exabytes, one for the Site of the Month and the Site of the Year 2021 under the Personal category. Let’s find out what I did with the blog and how this can also help you in the future if you are a blogger.
I was well prepared for my site to enter MWA. MWA will review and judge your site based on its design, SEO, accessibility, content and performance. As a frontend web developer with 15 years of experience in developing websites, I developed this IvanYolo blog from scratch, fine-tuned the server-side performance, optimized the page loading time, creating unique content, and also implementing SEO. This was what I was doing all the time for the past 15 years.
Design
I always wanted to have a minimalist blog design, that looks clean and easy to navigate. This was one of the first things that came into my mind before creating this blog. Also, come with a good structure and navigation that will give an advantage for user experience and search engine optimization. As a front-end web developer, I always try to get some inspiration from other themes, then built and customized them to my liking. It is pretty straightforward.
As you can see in 2022, I have further optimized my site with the fastest loading time without compromising my layout. This is one of my latest updates on the layout. I tried to feature content rather than include all of it on one page. Some of the advanced website optimizations that I have done for this blog include optimization of images, CSS/JS, server-side cache, reduced use of plugins and scripts that will clutter the entire site coding.
Performance
Now, this is one of my favourite topics when it comes to website performance. There are many factors that you need to improve in order to make the site load faster, this is where caching and optimisation comes into play. The site performance loading speed is measures and optimizations are done with speed test tools such as GTMetrix, Pagespeed Insights and Google Chrome Lighthouse. This blog is currently have its images, CSS/JS optimized and the use of CDN is also important.
As for the server-side caching, I have configured it so there are double layer of caching that work together to boost the site speed. Google Chrome’s Lighthouse is a great page speed test tool that you can use to troubleshoot and audit your current site loading speed and site errors. Having a fast loading website or blog helps in SEO and ranking too.
Content
One of the de factor of the unique content on this blog is the Fujifilm film simulation recipes. As a photographer, I shoot street photography in Malaysia and portraits as well. On the other hand, film photography is one of my favorite hobby that I like to inspire my visitors with my film photography reviews, travel photos and test shots. Most of these pages are custom design and developed on scratch, minimizing the use of scripts.
Final Thoughts
Well, that is what is all about Ivanyolo blog by Ivan Cheam, where you can find unique content with various topics that covers travel photos in Malaysia, street photography, portrait work, Hi-Fi music, pop culture, entertainment and many more. Although I’m not an influencer but most of my creation and work does influenced the audience of my website. Thanks again to MWA for the awards. One of my website Obscura recipes for street photography is currently using the Exabytes WordPress Hosting that uses the LiteSpeed cache for fast performance. Feel to check out more website guide section for website optimization topics based on WordPress.
