Welcome to the 9th Reader Blog Critique. Last weeks critique of The World Wide Web Blog had some great feedback from Alex, Hussein, HairySwede, Banji and Rarst. This week we have some great prizes for you all so I’m sure we will get a great response again.
This weeks review is on Carl Ocabs blog, a making money online blog which covers many aspects of making money on the web.
I spoke to Carl about his blog and he wanted to ask you all the following questions :
- Is there a room for user’s feedback?
- Are the fonts and color combination pleasing to the eyes?
- Is the layout neat and clutter minimal?
- Does it give lasting first impression?
- Is the information structured orderly?
In addition I welcome commenters to talk about the blogs content and design and any suggestions you have for promoting the blog.
3 Copies of ‘The Ultimate Blogging Theme’ up for grabs
This week there is a little more incentive for leaving some feedback on Carls blog. Carl is offering a copy of his brand new Ultimate Blogging Theme to the top 3 commenters. This great looking theme is a ready to go WordPress theme that is Google friendly, advertisement ready and available in 3 funky colours : Quirky Pink, Spit Fire Red and Earth Green.
The theme is based on Carls current design and is very easy to customise. There is a theme options page which allows you change the advertisement areas and feedburner details easily too. You can check out a demo of the Spit Fire Red version here.
Each winner will have an unlimited license (worth $97) which means that the theme can be used on as many blogs as you want. Carl will decide who the best commenters are.
As usual, I remind everyone that positive or negative, all feedback should be constructive.
If you have any questions about any of this please let me know in this thread 
Blog to be Reviewed : Carl Ocab
This is such a nice blog. Anyway, Carl! I'm also from the Philippines
1. Room for user's feedback? Do you mean comments? If it is, then yes it has because your comment area is good and it is threaded which I like most in all blogs because users can easily reply to other user's comment.
2. Arial font is a perfect font. This is what most blogs are using. Though the most pleasing font to the eyes is Times New Roman, Arial is still the best choice because it is a web 2.0 font. Font colors are fine. We can easily determine if it is a link or not. Link color is red and underlined.
3. Definitely, the layout is very clean and there's no distraction. It has more space for the content. The ads are arranged properly. The 3 blocks in the header is good but I think it need some updates. Hey! You're not anymore #1 in make money online keyword in Google HEHEHE.
4. Yes it is. As always, a blog that has a unique design give lasting first impression. Did you know that whenever I encounter a kid co-blogger, I used to always remember you? I'm not a regular visitor of yours but I know your blog! I remember the day when I got zero knowledge in MMO and i tried to search "make money online" in google. That's the day I discovered your blog!
5.Yes it is! Good that you are still blogging MMO. I hate those blogs blogging about make money online and seeing lifestyle post.
You know who's that man.
I agree with Hussein. I have only just found your blog but have looked through a few posts and I really like it. Nice and easy to navigate, informative articles for bloggers which is essential for me as I am publishing own first blog soon. Thanks for the post
2 Things (The more I looked, the more suggestions I found):
1. "Grab the KidBlogger's Master Plan" font to me looks cheesy. It is works, keep it, but to me, cheesy.
2. Testimonials section is unneeded, and I can't see how it adds any benefit. I have never seen a testimonial on a blog, and it is so far down and on the right that I doubt readers will care about what that random guy has to say when they get so far down the site.
3. I would make the RSS email subscribe background the same as the RSS feed subscribe, or maybe some other color. It blends too much with the sidebar, and gets lost.
4. Get the feed on the bottom is off center.
5. In your featured sites, the bold blue link says "I CHEAT TO MAKE MONEY". I know the advertiser probably paid for that, but that being the standout link on the sidebar smells fishy.
6. The About and Home links on top, when you hover them, you get red squares, the others have rounded corners.
7. Have some grayed out text in the search box saying "Search and Press Enter"
8. I like to see the number of posts per category in the sidebar. Nothing worse than clicking on a category to see it has 1 post.
And you aren't #1 for make money online, and I know you may have been at one time, but people who see that will think you are trying to lie to them, and they will run. And for that section it should be "Make Money Online".
Everything about your blog screams "sales pitch" to me. Either it is an actual product being advertised or it is an angle of promotion on a product. Which is fine, but it is blatantly obvious. That turns some people off (myself included) when it comes to visiting a site.
I would at least get rid of the "Sick of Scams" part and the "#1 in Google part" – After all when we search you in Google you're not number one and the first thing my mind thinks when I see that, see you aren't number one is that you're trying to scam me. Bad association.
And to be honest the whole "13 year old blogger" thing sounds scammy. And scammy makes people run.
As to your questions -
1) There's plenty of room on your site for user feedback layout wise, and it's easy to read/see.
2) Flowers and furry little animals are pleasing to the eyes. Fonts and colors just exist and are either readable or not. They are easily readable so that's good.
3) Yes it is neat with little clutter
4) It does give a lasting first impression. It screams "Buy something from me!!!"
5) Not quite sure what you mean by this. It's structured like any other blog. Nothing distinguishes your layout/design from 100000's of others out there.
Hadn't visited blog previousely so fresh impression.
First impression – what a well done sales page.
After getting hold of click-close reflex (critique to do) and few minutes of looking at it I had noticed that it is indeed a blog.
Answering questions
1. Not sure what feedback do you mean. There are comments on post obviously, what else you are looking for? There are quite a few poll-survey-widget-whatever services online for getting more feedback if you need it.
2-3. Looks like expensive premium theme. It actually is expensive premium theme.
It's good.
4. Expensive sales page. It sure creates trong first impression but I see no reasons it will hold after leaving.
5. Fine overall, more on specifics lower.
Ok, as usual moving from top to bottom.
Logo
6. Cool logo. Problematic tagline. I've read that you think it's part of brand and everything… Still people are naturally suspicious of mega-successful kids online. Claiming you are 13 when you in fact aren't ruins lots of trust.
Static pages
7. Good about, excellent contact pages.
8. Advertise page gives 404 error. By the way 404 page is empty and boring.
9. I totally don't like sitemap. Bad spacing between lines, it blends, lots of red text is hard to read, plenty of templated post titles, pages in the end (like someone is scrolling till that). No highlights on what is actually worth reading or any timeline indicators.
Home page
10. Search bar could use "Search blog" text or something in it. It is bit hard to notice.
11. Google claim is strong and I actually do get you as first results. Problem is plenty people don't. Google results are more targeted and less uniform each day. So it is balance – do you get enough by using strong claim to justify loss of trust from people who check it and it fails for them.
12. Masterplan giveaway could use short explenation what it is.
13. Recommended reading. I suspect it's for SEO purposes and such but I find post titles (both here and elsewhere on blog) extremely dull. They are all "make-money-something" or "how to" or something not meaningful at all.
14. Lower plenty of titles don't fit single line. Make them shorter or make font smaller.
15. "More" links seem in weird places like placed by automated means (are they?). There is no obvious introduction part, it just suddenly interrupted by continue link.
16. I've mistaken "featured post" for name of category until I saw it on every page. Distinction from rest of posts could be more obvious.
17. Sidebar is advertisment overkill. Sidebar barely has anything related to blog at all – bunch of categories links.
18. Subscriber counter is not a link to feed.
19. It's not like plenty of people are going to check that… But I took a look at your subcribers graph
http://www.FeedCompare.com/?feed1=problogging&…
700 > 6800 > 700 jump is screaming "suspicious". I know that is typical for feed dynamics to reach some critical point… But it took you year to 1k and two months to 10k. May be perfectly natural but it does not look natural (especially with that weird earlier spike). You are kinda wasting a lot of trust credit with sales looks, 13-old tagline, google claim…
You are probably better at MMO than I will ever be… So I can only say that personally I am not trusting your page and that isn't common reaction for me either.
Question is – do you want visitors to trust you?
Footer
20. Feed link in footer is redirected. Not bad just inconsistent with one in sidebar.
21. Small links at the bottom are hard to read and have no effect on hover. Not much sense in link to XML sitemap – human visitors are hardly interested in that and search engines can perfectly discover it from robots.txt.
Single post page
22. Could use gravatars to make comments more personal. Text blends. Author comments could use some extra styling. Otherwise nice as rest of theme.
Overall blog looks expensive, with plenty of SEO, probably awesome search traffic and strong sales-themed design.
But it doesn't look like something interesting to read (I am not in MMO niche but I still read some blogs because they are interesting and easy to digest) or something inspiring trust in visitor.
Let me start off by saying that I've seen much worse. I think in the case of your site, it's really all about editing the excess, and making some refinements. In fact, the site reminded me of Copyblogger.com with just more stuff piled on it.
Rarst covered quite a few things, so I'm going to try to share my thoughts without duplicating too much unless I have something else to add on it.
The first thing I saw was the logo – because it doesn't go with the rest of the design. I don't see a single rounded corner on the site -except- on the logo. Also the light gray border – I would change that to be the dark gray background color or the black. To me, the logo looks like it was just sort of stuck on the site and doesn't really go.
The main page menu at the top – make the text bold. The type is too thin and actually looks a bit grainy too me. There's also something quirky going on with your mouseover backgrounds on the menu. The last 3 have the clipped corners, but the 1st one has no clipped corners, and the 2nd is some where in between.
Tagline – I have to agree with the comments here. To me, it's a turnoff. I read in the about that you're actually 15, but still. If you want to market your age as the concept, maybe it could be rebranded as a site FOR young entrepreneurs, written by young successful entrepreneurs.
Change 'I'm Number One In Google' to 'I've Reached #1 In Google' – because currently you're #3. Make sure you talk about how maintaining that rank is a constant struggle and it will validate your authenticity and come across as honest. Or for that matter, replace that box with a product you sell (as in the last thing on the sidebar) since there is an 'advertise' page link at the top of the site.
I like using a different font to pitch people to get the free report, but I'd use something a little thicker. Also, I think would look better if the 'Yes' button was centered in the box instead of centered on the form – it would make it visually include the report as part of what you're doing. I also agree on describing the product some. It's obvious how people need to use the form, so I would remove the instruction text and replace it with a super short summary of what the report is about.
The ad in the first post is HUGELY distracting. That should be gone. Underneath the first post would be better if it's really necessary to have the same ad shown 3 times in the content section on the main page. It was also bugging me that the ad wasn't aligned to itself – a minor thing to be sure – but the black text and link are left aligned while the red text is center.
On that note, when it's shown the next two times in the horizontal rectangular boxes – change their background to white, it looks like you just popped the ad on their instead of making it match your site.
Change your subhead colors. I like red, I like red and white and black. However, your titles are red, all your subheads are red, your links are red. Everything blends together, and nothing screams at me to click on it or distinguishes itself. To bring back the Copyblogger reference, take a look at his site, and try making your subheaders black instead of red. Also, a mouseover on the title would be nice.
Also take a look your links – try something as a hover effect. When someone mouses over a link, it should enhance it, not take away from it. Links that fade on mouseover tend to discouraging a user from clicking it.
Click here to continue… tisk tisk, bad SEO. Continue reading [postname] with the postname being the only link portion would be better.
Start writing actual post excerpts instead of letting it generate a chunked version of your post.
Rework the sidebar by breaking up the sections. For instance, 4 ad boxes then the categories. Then 4 more boxes then the write for the blog and sister sites. etc…
On your individual post pages, right above the comments you have a header that says 'Related Posts' but it just has an ad there. If it's ad space only, remove the header. If it's supposed to be related posts, I checked several pages and it's always ads.
In a nutshell, I'd say you've got something decent here, but it feels too cluttered, too busy, and much too salesy (that a word?
). Some small tweaks here and there, and it would be much more readable.
Best of luck to ya!
G'dang! First of all, I would like to thank Kevin for giving me the opportunity to have my blog critiqued here at Blogging Tips – I've learned tons of stuff from your opinions guys.
I won't comment individually to the things you've mentioned (That would take me hours!), but I did notice these three things you've all mentioned…
1. I'm number one in Google area
2. Blog is too "salesy"
3. 13 year old tagline
I'll work on those ASAP and probably do the other stuff later when I get the time.
As for the winners of the theme, I'd say…
1. Durant – for his blatant comment that really woke me up
2. Rarst – for his detailed top to bottom design critic
3. Nicole – explained the tagline part pretty well and a well detailed critic
Glad the comments were a help in some way. A set of fresh eyes is always a help to anyone – we get comfortable with the quirks in our own sites after seeing them for so long.