Welcome to the 16th Reader Blog Critique. Last weeks critique of Techie Buzz had some good replies from abhishek, Pavan Kumar and as always, Rarst.
This weeks review is on JobMob, a blog which aims to bring together job seekers and jobfinders to find jobs in Israel and all over the world.
Here is what the owner Jacob thinks needs to be addressed :
- Subscribers don’t have enough incentive to come back to the site
regularly and I’m not willing to annoy my users with partial RSS feeds.- Although there’s good traffic and readership, most comments are from
non-subscribers.
The most helpful and constructive commenter will get $10. Alternatively, if you prefer, I can register a domain for you at eNom and push it to your account 
Jacob will decide who the best commenter was.
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 : JobMob
New blog for me. Took five minutes of poking to get I actually know author a bit. Hi, Jacob.
So impression is fresh but modified by pre-acquired level of trust to blogger.
Cool-looking but text-heavy design.
Answering questions
1-2. Why do you consider this most important questions to ask? I think it's pretty natural that subscribers won't visit every single article, and being subscriber doesn't mean being active member of community either.
General notes
3. Doens't validate http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://jobmob.c…
4. Well-optimized and fast loading blog. Good job.
5. 404 pafe could use some additional links.
Header area
6. I like graphic part of the logo. However tagline feels trimmed. Title has full version, but short tagline in logo doesn't hold completed thought on what site is about.
7. I was lost for few second where navigation is.
8. Test in search form is too long.
9. Subscriber count would look better in plain text than in chicklet, could use more interesting icon as well.
Index
10. Close to perfect, I only think category should come before tags.
Single post page
11. Move privacy policy closer to email input.
12. I don't think tags are necessary. Those who actually use them know them by heart anyway.
Category index
13. Uses excerpts and they are getting overwhelmed by links comparing to full posts in main index. Increase excerpts or lower amount of surrounding stuff.
Sidebar and navigation
14. Very cool concept but suffers from low visibility and bad ad integration.
15. Move sidebar higher so tab names stick in white space above.
16. Do something with ads, they make navigation extremely hard to figure out. Because of them it takes effort to notice that sidebar changes on clicking tabs.
17. In myBlogLog widget padding with text is too big comparing to few imagfes displayed. Add row of images or hide text part of widget.
18. I don't see Dilbert widget as very relevant and there is considerable lag before it loads.
19. Lists need bullets, greatly contribute to slight "wall of text" impresison.
Footer
20. Good.
21. Not very important but credits page could be structured better, I don't like feeling of logos slapped together.
22. Don't like contact form (in general and this one in specific), could use regular email link as well. Promise to get back is excessive, subject could use "Other option". Offer to "copy yourself" seems interesting but online human cloning is not at that stage yet.
Overall
Blog just screams "professional". Excellent looks, excellent content presentation. Could use some work on navigation – good concept but execution can be improved.
By the way I noticed extremely heavy use of nofollow. Is it there as decision or simply got that way for no reason?
Rarst has touched upon most of the things. i have one thing to say – regarding the domain name. If you are looking for people from all over the world to constantly keep track of the posts in your blog, consider moving to a .com domain. When I saw the name of the website to be reviewed, I knew its an Israeli website, and expected contents to be heavily dominated by Israeli jobs, but its not really.
I loved the design, the content and the niche. One suggestion regarding the tabs in right sidebar – Home, Archive, About & Best Of. In firefox 3, on click of these tabs, there were no corresponding actions found.
All in all, a very good site!
Thank you very much for sharing a very cool stuff. This is what I have been looking for. Very good site. keep up the good work.
Raju is right about .com thing…
What I feel is blog is not the right cms for job related sites…
Subscribers are not the ones who contact you nor regular visitors. Commentators are usually search engine visitors who really are looking for a solution and fail to find in our site, but they have hope that we can help. Other kind of commentators are those who own blogs and expect your comments on theirs.
Always, you should optimize site for organic thing than subscribers. And in your niche, subscribers are obviously job looking guys (for some time, they unsubscribe after getting job) or job consultants who never comment. Your blog is going in a good way and let it go in the same way. Don't worry about comments, nor go for buying them…
The winner by a landslide is Rarst with a terrific review that emphasized a number of things I already knew about while making me aware of others that no one had ever mentioned before. Great work! Thanks to Raju and Pavan as well. For all 3 – your compliments and feedback were very much appreciated.
Let me address the points.
Rarst- the text-heavy design is by design
It was important to have a fast-loading site and every addition required weighing whether the speed decrease was worth it.
1-2. I agree with what you said, I was just looking for a different take on these questions which I have asked others in the past.
3. The site stopped validating when I started nofollowing links, thanks for the reminder. I've removed the badge.
4. Thanks, see above.
5. It's on my todo list but not a high priority.
6. Thanks! I like short taglines, 3 words at most. Easy to remember and to the point. This one is still a bit vague because I haven't fully developed my vision of JobMob yet. Stay tuned.
7. Point taken. A lot of click testing has shown that most people find it but the bar on top looks like a nav bar and so people look there first.
8. I understand, but I want it to be clear.
9. I disagree! I like standardization and the FB chicklet is almost as widely recognized as the orange RSS button. It's about barriers to entry.
10. Testing it now.
11. Do you mean that I should put the privacy policy link near the email subscription box? That's a good idea.
12. Which tags are you referring to? I don't know what you mean when you say '…know them by heart'.
13. On my todo list already, but thanks for pointing it out.
14. Why bad ad integration? It's fairly standard to have the 125px buttons that way.
15. Good idea, I'll have to test this.
16. Any suggestions?
17. Can you send my a screenshot of what you're seeing? I don't see too much extra padding.
18. I'll have to put it in an iframe and test the difference.
19. This was intentional, otherwise I'd have list bullets everywhere. Actually, some spacing would probably be better.
20. Good.
21. I actually like the 'logo mash' when it's not too big.
22. This is going to change, I haven't decided all the details yet.
Nofollow- initially I didn't use nofollow at all. Then I decided to try an experiment and nofollow almost everything. Happy with the results, I'm continuing to nofollow that way. Google PR is focused on the blog and my text ad sales have gone up because of it.
Thanks again for a terrific review.
Raju –
domain name – this was a very conscious decision. It was either a long, tough to remember .com or a short, easy to remember .il. I'm happy with my choice, but I can always do a better job of convincing people why they should overlook the somewhat-Israeli focus.
tabs in FF3 – I can't reproduce this bug. Can you be more specific?
Pavan – my experience refutes most of what you say about subs v. commentators. However, you're right that I should optimize even more for organic traffic, that's a constant thought. And I would never buy comments, and I don't worry about them but I think there should still be more.