SUGAR SHOCK! Blog -- Trying to Serve You Better With A New Look, Thanks to Blog Gurus

My intention is to serve you, dear reader, as best as possible. I'd like to provide you content on this SUGAR SHOCK! Blog that moves you to action, items that intrigue you, remarks that inspire you. And I want to make this an online place where you're comfortable sharing your ideas and thoughts, too.

So to that end, I've been focusing on making my blog more pleasing to the eye, easier to navigate, a more fun to hang out for a while and just all around more enticing.

But I needed help -- lots of it.

To that end, as I mentioned last month, I first enlisted the help of The Blog Squad -- that's Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman to critique my blog. Then, two weeks ago, I signed up for the duo's month-long Better Business Blogging course. (It's been fabulous so far -- I've already attended two weeks, with two more to go.)

Then, last week, thanks to blogger/marketer Seth Godin, I was thrilled to learn about the talented John t. Unger, who, while best known as an artist (see one of his creations above), has been a lover, teacher and expert of Typepad.

When I saw that he runs Typepad Hacks and offers great ideas on how to make money with your blog, I turned to him for help, too. John set to work adding helpful buttons and links. For instance, he added this cool e-mail me button.

Then, he put in some subscribe buttons

• Get Sugar Shock Blog
  in your email

  Subscribe to Sugar
  Shock Feed. RSS Help?

And he added the options so you can submit this blog so others can find out about it and get helped, too. For instance, you'll now see Add to del.icio.us, Stumble It!, Add to Technorati Favorites and other links.

Next, he added a Books Feed, buy-the-book Smarts Feed button, which takes you to a page where you have your choice of online retailers to use to buy SUGAR SHOCK!This widget from Adaptive Blue is another great idea that I completely owe to Seth Godin, who has the same time of widget on his blog.

I also was fortunate to find another web guru, Stephanie Cockerl, who is skilled at web design and web development.

What's more, Stephanie does a lot of speaking at top Internet events. For instance, she was one of those selected to talk at the BlogHer conference, and you can find her in October at the Virtual Tradeshow & Job Fair ecomXpo.

Actually, while looking at Stephanie's blog, I became inspired me to add one of these really cool Recent Readers widgets, where you get to put your face on this blog.

Check it out, readers. It's a really fun addition here so please do say hello, thanks to this amazing widget powered by MyBlogLog. (It's to your right, underneath the Recent Posts section.)

Meanwhile, Stephanie is still adding some final finishing touches. For instance, today she put in the Stop SUGAR SHOCK! Radio show subscribe now button. (It's located to the left as of now, under the Listen Live button and looks like this:

SUBSCRIBE NOW!

Wow! I'm so grateful to Patsi, Denise, John and Stephanie for their amazing contributions to this blog.

I do hope you, savvy readers, like the changes here. Please let me know.

So what do you think of the new, more polished look here at the SUGAR SHOCK! Blog? I'd love to hear your thoughts. And, if you have any suggestions, feel free to pass them on.