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Marketing

Showing and telling: the rule for blogs, too! Trish-MollyGumnut.blogspot.com

6 Comments

Today we’re looking at Trisha Puddle’s blog, Trish-MollyGumnut.blogspot.com. But Kathleen covered everything so well today that her comments will be the bulk of the post. (In case you’re wondering, we write our reviews separately, and if there’s overlap . . . actually, until now there’s never really been overlap!)

Jordan’s comments

Pages & content

The very last link on sidebar (last line) leads to your profile, where you have an email link. It would be easier for people to contact you with a dedicated contact page.

How can you get a contact page in Blogger? Make a post called “Contact” and put your contact information in it. Publish it, then use its URL in a menu bar. (Making a menu bar in Blogger can be a little technical, but you can find very, very simple instructions, too.)

So many writers hear the advice to start a blog and ask, “What would I blog about?” This is a great example of how you can blog about your research. You could also draw these posts out—limit posts to a few pictures at a time (probably five or fewer, so readers won’t be overwhelmed) and give a little more description. If you’re comfortable with it, maybe show a few lines from your WIPs about those animals and settings to put them into context—let us know what they mean even though we haven’t read the stories yet.

Some of the posts are a good example of an in-world character blog—but some of them aren’t. [Kathleen has more advice about both these last points, too.]

Search engine presence

On a search for your name, your Blogger profile is the #1 result on Google and #2 on Yahoo. Your blog shows up as #2 on Google. Once again, Bing is not being kind to our volunteers, and Yahoo doesn’t have your blog either.

However, on a search for [molly gumnut] (the name of her character and her series), the the one search engine that has your blog as #1 is Bing. That’s a first. #1 on Google is your Twitter profile. #1 on Yahoo is your Blogger profile again.

The other results are places around the web, mostly blogs and forums, where you’ve commented or posted work for critique. Search engines are listing a lot of other pages as more relevant than yours for your name and Molly’s name. You could definitely increase your search engine visibility. The same advice I’ve given others applies—guest blogging, linking back to your site using your name, etc. Since you have a few critique posts out there, you might consider emailing the blog owners to ask them to link your submission back to your blog.

Good luck!

Kathleen’s comments

Dear Trisha,

Your pictures of the wildlife around your house are great! Not many children (especially those in the city) can imagine seeing such variety.

I’d like to ask a question: Who visits your blog? Or rather, who do you WANT to visit your blog? Children? Their parents? Your friends? Publishing professionals?

Pretend you are that person, pretend you’ve never seen your blog before, and take a look at it with fresh eyes. What do you find?

First, it appears as though you, the author, are Molly Gumnut. (Lots of aspiring authors use childhood photos, for some odd reason.) You say, “Welcome to ‘my’ blog” . . . and since the only name we’ve been given is Molly’s, we assume that YOU are Molly. That, in turn, made me assume that these were stories from your childhood. I didn’t realize this assumption of mine was wrong until I scrolled down the bottom and happened to find your real name.

Second . . . you know the writing rule, “Don’t tell, show?” That applies to websites, too. People don’t want to be told what is somewhere on the site, they want to simply be presented with it.

bandicootThat paragraph on the right is full of telling. “I will be adding pictures.” (When you add them, you SHOW us that.) “I will update them each week.” (That’s dangerous to put, because when they see you haven’t for a month and a half, they think the blog is abandoned. Don’t tell people how often you’ll update, just update! 🙂 ) “There are a number of links.” Just put the links in, rather than telling us that they’re there somewhere.

What do you want your blog to do instead? Well . . . just like a book, you want it to hook your readers immediately! In a book, you hook your reader with action. On a writer’s website, you hook your reader with the world of your books. That’s why your photos are so wonderful.

So all you need to do is clean this up so that the visitors realize they’re looking at pictures that reflect chapter books, rather than pictures from the author’s childhood.

Here are some ideas and suggestions:

1) Take out the childhood picture and see if you can find (or have someone you know draw) an illustration of Molly. That will help us realize that Molly is fictional. It doesn’t have to be amazing quality . . . even a child’s drawing would work, since these are children’s books. They will help portray “children” and “fiction.”

2) The picture at the top needs to fill the width of the blog. I also think that it should be an illustration that matches your illustration of Molly. Pick a fun scene out of one of your stories, and have someone draw a picture of Molly in that scene. The picture should include “The Wonderful World of Molly Mavis Gumnut” AND the words “by Trisha Puddle.” That also portrays “fiction” and gives us your name. If Molly lives in Australia, then make more of it! Americans are fascinated by Australia and the wildlife there, and I’m sure much of the rest of the world is, too! Then, make sure your background colors match those in the illustration.

3) Your welcome spot on the left . . . take out the “Welcome to The Molly Gumnut Blog” (you don’t really ever need to say “Welcome,” we know it’s a blog, and you’ll have her name up at the top), and take out the first seven sentences. They’re telling and won’t interest people. Instead, do a little bio of Molly, starting with the most interesting thing about her. ie: “Eight-year-old Molly learned to ride a turtle.” or “Molly decided to be a vet the day she watched snake eggs hatch.” Choose something really out-of-the-ordinary.

4) If you can, put an illustration-looking frame around each of your snapshots. This will pull the snapshots “into” the world of Molly. You can pretend that Molly (or her mother) took them, if you want. But this will keep the new site look of the fiction world cohesive. [Note that this is particularly effective if your see your potential audience as mostly children who will/have read your books.]

5) If you want to keep the links to animal rescue in the sidebar, go ahead . . . but you need to make them clickable links. Here’s how you do it.
Instead of just pasting the link in, surround it with this code:
<a href="http://www.TheLink.com">http://www.TheLink.com</a>

So your RSPCA link would be:
<a href="http://www.rspca.org.au/">http://www.rspca.org.au/</a>

It will LOOK the same on your blog, but it’ll be clickable instead of straight text. I’d also suggest putting it in Molly’s terms. “Molly loves to rescue animals, and you can help her by . . .”

6) Your most recent blog post: take out both “Wonderful Word of . . .” because you’ll have that in the header. A better post title might be “Where Does Molly Play?” Then just show the photos with the captions. Again, don’t TELL us the photos are there . . . especially when we’re about to be SHOWN them!

7) Finally, watch your grammar. I’m a grammar nerd, so not everyone will notice what I do . . . but you have quite a few fragments (that aren’t in someone’s POV to excuse them as thoughts), and some capitalized words in the middle of sentences that shouldn’t be, and a few missing commas around clauses. There aren’t a lot, but this blog is your face on the Internet. As an aspiring author, grammar problems will tell against you more than they do any other group of people.

I hope this is helpful to you, and good luck with your books! The post you did where you mentioned Molly trying to rescue a bandicoot caught my interest, since I’m not even sure what a bandicoot is!

-Katie/Kathleen
http://www.KatieDidDesign.com
http://www.KathleenMacIver.com

What do you think? Could you do a whole blog (not just a post) in your character’s world? How can you use the world of your books to hook your website visitors?

Photo credit: bandicoot by Greenstone Girl

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Marketing

Optimizing a site for users and search engines: LoriTironPandit.com

7 Comments

Maintenance note: if you tried to download the free PDF guide to writing deep POV and the link didn’t work, it’s now fixed. Thanks to everyone who notified me about the broken link!

Today we have our third website review. We’re looking at Lori Tiron-Pandit‘s beautiful site. Both Katie and I thought her site was very well done—from the design to the writing of the pages, Lori has done a great job of creating her site. But Katie and I also found a number of technical issues that might be holding her site back. So there’s going to be a lot of technical advice here—be forewarned!

Jordan’s comments

Hi Lori! Like I said above, I think you’ve done a great job with your site. But something about the code is keeping your site from performing well in search engines—or even appearing at all, in some cases. So there’s a lot of information on that, though I’m afraid I might not be much help.

Pages

You have your email address listed and linked on each page of your website. That’s good—but I’m worried some visitors might not think to scroll down. (This is why I recommend having a specific contact page, so visitors always know where to find your contact info.)

On your Written page, you have original and translated poetry, as well as links to your novels in progress. If you’re using your website primarily to position yourself as a poet and translator, this may be fine. But if you’re using your website to position yourself as a fiction author, I would feature those links more prominently on the Written page—maybe in the paragraph above the poetry (with maybe a log line or other one-sentence hook), or at least “above the fold” (in the area of the screen you can see without scrolling down).

Your about page does a great job highlighting your professional qualifications and credits, with a nice sidebar on your life to make it personal.

Aside from the blogs, I don’t see any social media on your site. However, on your daily writing blog, you do feature your Twitter profile in the sidebar. I might move that up a little. I would definitely recommend moving the “Subscribe” box up to the “above the fold” area to encourage visitors to subscribe.

Your site is polished, easy to read and easy to navigate. Other than possibly your contact information, your visitors should be able to find most of what they’re looking for. The names of your various pages may be a little cryptic—I can guess what “Written” links to, and “Daily Writing Blog,” “Reading List,” and “Bio” are easy to understand, but I don’t really know what to expect when I click on “Flower Seeds.” However, on that page you do have an explanatory paragraph that explains the purpose of the page.

You have multiple blogs on your site, but you do a great job of highlighting their content on the front page and cross-promoting among your blogs.

Search engine presence

Your search engine presence is a mixed bag. Bing doesn’t list any of your sites in the top ten, though they have mentions of you on various guest posts and comments around the web.

Yahoo’s top two results for your name are from your daily writing blog (and the followers page for your blog is #4). Your bio is #3, but your main website doesn’t appear there. The rest of the top 10 results appear to be your profile on various social networks.

Google, like Yahoo, has your top two results from your daily writing blog, your Twitter page and various mentions of your name on guest posts, comments and forums to round out the top ten.

This means only one of the major search engines has any page from your website in the top ten results for your name.

Part of the problem here is that, of the pages on your website, only two pages on your domain have content that search engines can read. (Your daily writing blog has content search engines can read, but it’s on the blogspot.com domain—you could move this to blog.loritironpandit.com with Blogger Custom Domain, if you want—every little link helps!)

(You probably know this already, but for everyone else:) Search engines are kind of stupid. They’re only really good at text. (They’re getting better at Flash, and they’re working on images and video, but that’s mostly from context.) Search engines use programs called “spiders” to crawl the web, read the content, and return what they find so the search engine can index it and call it up later. Here’s what a spider sees when it reaches your Flower Seeds page:

flower seeds home written daily writing blog the reading list flower seeds bio flower seeds is about my family s journey toward a simpler more natural more aware life it s about reconnecting with our environment with traditions that have been passed to us from our romanian and indian families and with rituals that we create together blog summary widget archive archive copyright 2008 2009 lori tiron pandit all rights reserved [source]

And that’s it. Visitors can read the rest of the content—all of the blog entries—but search engines can’t find the text or the individual post pages.

What search engines see instead of a blog 🙁

After some serious digging, I think I might have found the problem. I believe it’s either one of two things:

  1. Rumor has it that with your website builder, iWeb, the font you choose—or even the version of the font you choose—can affect how your site is coded. iWeb makes some fonts appear as text in the code, while others (or maybe just certain versions) appear as images (i.e. unreadable to search engines) in the code.
  2. The more likely option: you may be using a widget to import your posts to the pages. The widget uses JavaScript to bring the summary entries to the page—yet another thing search engines aren’t great at yet (though they’re working on that one, too). And if that’s the case . . . wow. I really don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what alternatives iWeb offers, but I recommend exploring them. If there’s no other way to do this, you might also think about moving to another platform. (I can imagine how you’d implement the same site design on a WordPress installation, for example, and I came across lots of resources for transferring, and I know there are cheap HTML to WordPress theme services.)

You can also add meta data like I’ve recommended for Livia and Eileen—here’s a page on more tips on getting a site search-engine friendly in iWeb.

To help search engines find your site, get links with your name as the text (“anchor text”). You can do this through guest posts and comments, like you’re already doing. One last suggestion: if you’re planning to use your site to attract future translation gigs, you could set up a page (maybe “under” Home or Bio) devoted to Romanian translation—with “Romanian translation” in the title. When you try to get links for that page, use “romanian translation” (or whatever term you think people would use to search for those services) in the anchor text.

Kathleen’s comments

Lori,

Your site is beautiful! The applique-looking flowers and scrollwork carry a note of something ethnic, and while I didn’t immediately think “Romanian,” I DID want to look and see what you wrote. (Of course, I knew you were a writer. I think that would still have been clear to a wandering visitor, since both your quote, with “gathering words,” and your links menu, portray that information.)

Your intro paragraphs also feel like a naturally-spoken welcome, and your in-text links are also naturally well done. ie: You didn’t say: “You can visit my blog or read what I’ve written,” etc. Those always have the effect of making me NOT want to click on either link. Done the way you did, I’m curious, but the links aren’t shoved in my face. Well done!

What would I recommend? Well, quite frankly, you’ve done extremely well! Your pages present information in a way that a visitor and reader feels encouraged to read. Your text is easy to read. The colors are relaxing. And I LOVE your author photo. It’s not your standard “author photo” but it really has character, both in the shot and the unusual shape of it, and that character really reflects what I see on the whole site.

Once you sell a book, you’ll want to redo your pages to subtly guide your visitors toward a page where they can buy your book [and she wrote this review even before I said that yesterday!] . . . but that’s not the case now, and I wouldn’t change it!

Page loading times

The only issue I came across was that a number of your pages loaded quite slowly. That turns away people on slower modems. (I’m on cable.) I was wondering if it was your website server having problems or my own connection having problems . . . until I saw the size of your background images . . . and realized that you have different background images for every page.

That’s what’s slowing down your page loading times so much, and it’s ALSO upping your website bandwidth (which you’ll be charged more for, once your traffic gets high enough).

Let me go through a few guidelines for anyone designing their own website . . . especially since I’ve recommended more images to many of the people I’ve done reviews for.

Text loads fast. Images are what slow down loading times for pages. Images are a large part of what gives your site character, however. The trick is to find the balancing point.

Large images can take a while to load, and lots of small images add up. So the goal is to not use images for anything that can be done without images (such as text menus, solid color borders, and spacing) and to keep the images you MUST use as small as possible.

Lori . . . your blue background image is as wide and long as an entire page. Your tan paper-looking background is also that wide and long. Your header image is ALSO almost that wide, and it’s two inches long. That means there are three layers of images at the top of your site, all of which are slowing down your bandwidth, even though only one is visible.

Are you aware that your site can look EXACTLY the same, if you find the repeating marks in both background images and crop them down? Both background images could be about 3% the size that they are right now. Your blue background could be a 1″ by 1″ square (maybe even smaller), and it would still repeat across the entire page the same way the large one currently does . . . except the browser would only have to download a TINY image, instead of a huge one.

Same with the yellow background. It could be only 1″ x 1.” Take the border edge off and change the code so that this section of the page has a 1 pixel border down both sides, in the same color it currently is. Your tiny image will then repeat and fill the same area and look exactly the same as it does now.

Your header image should be cropped to just above the text…then use “padding” in the code to scoot the image down (though I wouldn’t scoot it down quite as much).

(I’m not sure what size the orange background is on the bio, since I couldn’t quickly find it in your code. It should be small, too. Ditto with the brown background behind your menu.)

Next…

Site architecture

You have a separate folder set up for each page of your site. This means that every time someone visits a new page, the SAME IMAGES are downloaded again. Instead of organizing your site this way, you should have one image folder. Every page pulls the images it needs from that one folder. That way, when a visitor moves to a page that uses the same image, the browser KNOWS it’s the same image and doesn’t download it again. It just shows the one it downloaded for the last page.

So typically, we design a site so that all of the pages are in the root (main) folder, and we have a sub-folder called “images.” All of the images are in that, and when we want to put an image on a webpage, we code that the image is at: url(images/background-image.jpg). It’s only on really REALLY large sites that we create additional subfolders for sections of the site, because that makes the coding more complicated. And simple is usually better. 🙂 [We don’t know how feasible this would be in iWeb, but look around to see if you can change the CSS and code to refer to a single image source.]

Optimizing load times

Finally, if you MUST use an image that’s big (like your header), do a little trial and error. Save it as a .jpg and as a .gif. Run the .gif image through the “Image Optimizer” that’s free to use here: http://www.netmechanic.com/GIFBot/optimize-graphic.htm, and see if any of the faster-loading images look just as good as your original. Compare the size of them with the .jpg you saved, and used the one with the smallest kilobytes. Sometimes the .jpg will be smaller, and sometimes one of the reduced .gifs will be smaller. But this way you know you’re loading your design as quickly as you can.

And when you’re done (or maybe before you’re done), have NetMechanic check your page. It’s free, but it’ll tell you just how fast (or slow) your page loads. http://www.netmechanic.com/products/HTML_Toolbox_FreeSample.shtml

Happy writing and designing!

-Katie, KatieDid Design

We hope this helps—while the technical issue here may be unique to Lori’s site, we also hope that everybody can take away some principles of design and accessibility to help with your sites!

What do you think? Do you notice page load times? What do you think Lori can do to take her site to the next level?

Photo credit: File folders by Aya Otake

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Marketing

Get set phase website and blog review: EileenAstels.com

6 Comments

Another website review today! I feel like I’ve known Eileen for a while, since I’ve seen her around the comments of other blogs (like Kaye Dacus‘s and Nathan Bransford‘s) for over a year, but we haven’t really “talked” until she came to this blog (woot!). Now she thinks I’m a Superior Scribbler (why, thank you!), and she volunteered for the next website review with her site, EileenAstels.com. Katie and I both also looked over her blog, EileenAstels.blogspot.com, too.


Eileen’s website

Jordan’s comments

I see from your blog that you’re just entering the “get set” phase— you’re submitting to editors and agents now. Congratulations (and good luck)! It’s important that visitors can figure out what your site is about and what they’re supposed to do once there there. Your site looks pretty ready—it’s professional, easy to navigate, and the left navigation makes it easy for your visitors to find the important stuff on your site.

However, your genre and even the fact that you’re a writer almost seemed “buried” below the header. (It was several minutes before I saw it there.) You should use that line of text or something similar right under your name at the top as a tagline to make your purpose, niche and genre apparent when someone stumbles across your site.

Individual pages

In this phase, your contact page is more important than ever. So woot on already having a contact page! If you want, you might also use the form that GoDaddy can install on a contact page. (If you’ll recall, this page is the #1 thing an aspiring author’s website must have.)

You might consider relabeling “Eileen’s Hopefuls.” I guessed what you meant, but it almost sounds a little sad 😉 . Plus, it could be clearer—I knew what I was looking for when I came to your site. Not everyone will. On the plus side, I like your organization here—presenting your books as a planned collection or series. It looks like some of your books’ statuses need to be updated (books 3, 4 and 5).

I’d also recommend that you expand the book descriptions here into full “pitches” like you’d present in a query letter, especially for the later books (because the agents/editors will have already seen the pitch for the first book). It’s totally up to you, but you could think about putting a short excerpt—maybe five pages—on your site, too.

I might reword or delete the first sentence of the last paragraph on the Hopefuls page—it almost sounds like you’re planning on just using the series as a warmup exercise.

Your about page is personable and professional.

Search engine presence

Your search engine presence is good. Your site is #1 in Google and Bing and #2 on Yahoo for [Eileen Astels]. Your blog is #1 on Yahoo, #2 on Google and #6 on Bing for [Eileen Astels]. Other sites in the top ten for your name are the widget for your blog, Facebook, Afictionado, and Amazon.ca. While those are fine, it couldn’t hurt to seek out opportunities to get your name out there more—like you’re doing through coblogging, comments and guest blogging. (Be sure to get the most out of guest blogging if you do it.)

A few other tricks you could do to help:

  • Change the <title> element on your home page to “Eileen Astels Official Website” or “Eileen Astels – Inspirational Romance Author” or something like that. Right now, if I were to bookmark your home page or minimize my browser while viewing it, it would be described as “Home Page.” I’d lose that in my bookmarks. Plus, it’s helpful to have a descriptive title for search engines to understand what your homepage is about. (I don’t use GoDaddy for building sites, but I believe this is under “Page title.”)
    • However, if changing this changes the title of the page on the left-hand side, see if “Eileen Astels Home” or just “Eileen Astels” will fit.
  • Use headers to organize and emphasize your text, rather than just using size/styles. If you look at the source code here, you’ll see that “Jordan McCollum” is in a <h1> tag—a header (top level) tag. That indicates to search engines what the page is about. Use header tags (h1, h2, h3) to organize your text hierarchically. Test this to see what they look like, but in most designs the header tags are large and bold. (Technically, this technique seems to be losing a little power, but it can still help.)
  • Use meta descriptions to control the “snippet” in search engines. Right now, search engines are showing “The Eileen Astels Official Website. Your Subtitle text … Welcome to the web desk of Eileen Astels, an Inspirational Christian Romance Writer. …” But if you have a meta description that matches a query, they’ll show that instead (i.e. without “Your Subtitle text”). You might have to insert them in HTML, like I told Livia).

Social media & your blog

For whatever reason (I’d guess browser incompatibility, but I’m not sure), I don’t see the widget showing up on your homepage. I see you’re on Facebook (on your blog) and Twitter; you could consider having widgets for those on your website, too, in the sidebar, on the main page or on the contact page.

Your blog looks to be a good mix of appealing to and networking with fellow writers, sharing your love of literature and sharing your life in an appropriate way. It looks like your content is fun, interesting and useful, and with 50+ followers and twenty-something comments on most posts you’ve clearly built a community around your blog.

My only advice here would be to set up your blog to be hosted at http://blog.eileenastels.com. You can do this through Blogger and GoDaddy, your domain registrar, without changing anything else, really. Setting up Blogger Custom Domain is a little bit technical, but not very hard.

Why do you want to do this? Because every link to your blog is a “vote” for your site in search engines’ eyes. The more votes you have, the more authority search engines think your site has. But if these links point to http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com, it’s BlogSpot getting all that authority. If you move your blog to blog.eileenastels.com, the votes now all go toward your domain (which many professionals believe will give your site an overall lift—and since Blogger will redirect your links, it can’t hurt!).

This might seem like a lot, but really, you have a good site set up so far and a few tweaks could take it to the next level.

Katie’s comments

Dear Eileen,

Nice to meet another Christian romance writer! 🙂

Your site uses a common layout, but it’s still tasteful, in relaxing colors, and is easy to navigate. Those may seem like simple compliments, but they’re extremely important. (And many people get them wrong.) So congratulations! It is also a perfectly-functioning site, as it is. So these thoughts are just things to consider the next time you feel like doing a re-design.

What would I recommend on your site? Well, to me, there are three main issues.

Web-safe fonts

The font that you’ve chosen for the green bar (that says, “Welcome to the web desk of . . .”) and the scripture verse is very hard to read. At least, it is on my computer. (This is the only thing that might NOT be perfectly-functioning on other computers. Read on to understand why.)

Here’s the thing about using fonts other than Arial, Courier, Georgia, Times, and Verdana . . . you have absolutely no guarantee that your visitors have the same font installed on their computer that you do. What does the browser do if you’ve told it to render “Viner ITC” and the visitor (like me) doesn’t have it? The browser picks one at random and renders the text in it. So the visitor is totally stuck if the browser picks “Webdings” or some illustrative font that renders a picture for each letter. (I have no idea what Viner ITC looks like, so I don’t know what font YOU see on your computer. I also don’t know which, of my 100+ fonts, the browser picked . . . I just know it’s not easy to read.)

The only way to avoid this is to stick to the very, very short list of fonts that are pre-installed on all versions of all operating systems. (Google them, if you’d like.) If you want to do something in a font other than that, you have to use a graphics program to make an image of your text in that font [That’s what I did for my header when I fell in love with that font—Jordan]. (And then make sure you use an alt tag for that image, so that blind Internet users’ text-reading programs can still tell them what the text says [And also search engines!—Jordan].)

While I’m on fonts . . . I’d recommend un-italicizing the rest of your text as well. It’s harder on the eyes, and therefore makes it more likely that your readers will click away without reading it. (You’d be surprised how little a website visitor needs to click away! And most of it is subconscious, too, so you can’t argue with it.)

Conveying your genre in the design

Your header image portrays writing . . . but not inspirational romance. I’d see if you can find something a little more romance-y. Adjust your background colors, if needed, to match . . . but keep them tasteful and relaxing! Also, your header image stretches farther down the page than your navigation menu. That looks a little . . . “off” to me. Maybe see if you can add a few other little items of interest in that bar on the left. Do you have a twitter feed? How about a favorite scripture? Or an image that coordinates what your header? Maybe you can install a widget that will automatically post the titles to your last five blog posts?

Blog/site transition

Finally, your blog’s overall feel doesn’t reflect your site’s at all. It makes the reader do a double-take and think, “Wait! Did I click on that right? Is this really the same person? It can’t be! No . . . wait, (checking back and forth) that’s the same name, so it must be. Okay. . . .”

You don’t want that interruption. If someone visits one, and then later visits the other, you want them to think, “Hey, this looks familiar! I must have been on this woman’s site before or something.” And actually, your blog reflects Inspirational Romance much more than your site does. Where did you get the background image? Do you have permission to use it on your site as well? I can think of several ways to use it, if you’re interested.

Finally, two other tiny things:
4) Your header bar, with your name in it, looks too long . . . almost like you’ve got a blank line under the text. I’d scoot it up against the top of the browser window (so the brown background doesn’t show) and shorten that up so it’s about half the height it currently is.

5) On your tips, hopefuls, and contact pages, you’ve got a light green background behind the text, that’s covering your gradient image. (It’s not . . . and it looks better . . . on your home and about pages.)

I hope this is helpful to you!

-Katie, KatieDid Design

What do you think? What other feedback would you give Eileen on her site?

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Marketing

Get-ready phase blog review: LiviaBlackburne.blogspot.com

8 Comments

After we looked at four goals of an author’s website (before publication), now we’re ready to start our website reviews. Just as a reminder, my day job is in Internet and search engine marketing. Kathleen MacIver, my co-reviewer, runs KatieDid website design. Our first victim review is of LiviaBlackburne.blogspot.com. Thanks for being the first to step up to the plate for the website reviews, Livia!


Livia’s site

Jordan’s comments

Hi, Livia! If I had to guess, I’d say you’re in the get ready phase—you’re in the process of writing, but you’re not submitting to agents or editors yet.

In the get ready phase, your goal is to build a community around your blog. You can network with other writers (and maybe agents and editors), you can appeal to readers of your chosen genre, you can tout your platform or skills.

So right now, I’d focus on using your blog in one or more of those ways. As far as usability goes, right now, you’re probably okay, but you’ll want to make some changes before you use your blog as a marketing tool or mention it in a query letter.

Your blog can actually perform the functions of a full website if you add a menu bar. On the menu bar, you’d want to link to your about page, contact page and works page, at a minimum. (Your blog would probably benefit from at least the first two right now.) Additionally, you can buy the domain LiviaBlackburne.com and put your blog on it. (If you want to develop a separate website later, no problem—put your blog on blog.liviablackburne.com and you can add your main website at liviablackburne.com later.)

If you do anything now, I would add a way for someone to contact you directly. Yes, we can tweet you, but if we’re not on Twitter, the only other way we have to contact you is through a blog comment—not very private.

Posts and their content

A huge strength of your blog already is your focus on a topic and a niche—a [neuro]scientific approach to writing. In terms of quality, your posts look great! You have really good, helpful content. Generally, however, when you post more frequently, your blog will grow more. Posts are what blogs are for, after all 😉 . Once a week is probably the minimum, and it’s important to be consistent.

If you have trouble coming up with things to write about, you could break some of your future posts into series of shorter posts (you could get four posts out of a post like yours on the power of prologues, for example). Series also helps to build a sense of anticipation among your blog readers—they’re looking forward to your next post.

You can also add more bulleted lists to help make your reading more scanable, if suited to your posts. Pictures, even stock photos, also help to break up big blocks of text and draw in readers (I use sxc.hu and Flickr Creative Commons search to find mine). See the screencap at right to see how photos break up what otherwise looks like a long block of text. (Also, there’s a bulleted list in there; they stand out more when you do them “for real” instead of just throwing a graphic together like that.) The screencap also includes the recommendations I have made/will make about your sidebar.

For a blog that’s pretty young, you’re already getting multiple comments on your posts—woot! You can always try to appeal more directly to encourage blog comments, such as asking discussion questions at the end of the post.

Similarly, you can appeal directly to your readers to become Followers and subscribers.

Search engine presence

Your search engine presence is decent. I think you’re very smart to start using your married name now (and congrats and good luck on the big day!)—changing later would’ve caused a few problems. You have little competition for your name. This blog is #1 on Yahoo and #6 on Google for your name. (#1 on Google is your Twitter page; #1 on Bing is your other blog.)

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find this blog on Bing. To help improve your rank on Google and get indexed by Bing, look for opportunities for links with your name as the anchor text, like guest blogging, your friends’ blog rolls, etc.

Also, you can sometimes have more control over the “snippet” that appears in search engine results (the description below the blue link) by using the meta description element. The format is:

<meta name="description" content="[description of your site, such as what you have below your blog name]" />

The description you put there will show up as the snippet in search results (if there isn’t a better match for the search terms elsewhere on the page).

Here are some more specific instructions on how to insert header codes in Blogger.

Social media

You’ve done a great job of integrating Twitter with your blog with the Twitter widget in the sidebar and TweetMeme on each post. This goes both ways, since you actively use Twitter and promote your blog posts there (good!). You also promote your subscription options well, though I might recommend moving them above the topics menu (that way we can see the subscribe buttons “above the fold”—in the area of the page you can see without having to scroll down).

I might also move the Twitter widget above the Google ads, but that’s fairly subjective.

In all, you’re off to a good start. A little work on the static pages and posting consistency will get your blog to the next level.

Katie’s comments

Hello Livia!

First, I’d like to say that I find your little catch phrase quite intriguing! What IS a brain scientist’s take on creative writing?

However, this is a website review, so I’ll have to focus my comments on your blog design . . . and frankly, I’m not sure what to say. There’s not really anything to critique, since it appears to be a basic template. A website made from a basic, generic template (99% of the time) is like finding a hardcover book that’s missing its dust jacket (the old kind that had nothing more than a solid color and gold lettering on the edge). There’s nothing to turn you off to the book/site, but you really had to have a compelling reason from somewhere else in the universe to open up that book and start reading, because the book cover itself is offering you nothing.

You do have that little paragraph that explains a little. Now you need to find a design that is the visual interpretation of your concept. A header image/text would help . . . my initial thoughts would be your name long, spaced out (and not too large) and centered, then immediately under it, in a strong technical-looking font, your words, “A brain Scientist’s take on” on the left, leading to “Creative Writing” on the right, but done in a fun “creative” font. This would give a partial “translation” of the text and help show the contrast between “brain scientist” and “creative writing.” (Note: this text would have to be turned into an image . . . check back for the next review for the reason why.)

Then, a background and/or other image here or there that carried that contrasting theme would be fantastic. You’d want something that melds technical/scientific/detailed, with art. (I’d sure have fun designing that one!)

Your layout is fine . . . basic layouts for blogs are often best, since people are there to read content (once they know they’re interested, of course).

So all-in-all . . . you don’t have anything wrong here, but you haven’t really taken any steps toward the two main goals of a website’s design, which are:

  1. Instantly portray what your website is about, and what the visitor will receive if they hang around. (In your case, interesting information that they’re not likely to find anywhere else on the Internet, since the number of brain scientists blogging about writing has got to be extremely small)
  2. Make the site stick in their mind, thereby upping their chances of wanting to come back, coming back, and remembering why they bookmarked it when they do come back.

Feel free to drop me a line if you’ve got any more questions!

-Katie, KatieDid Design

What do you think? Can Livia’s site do more? What advice would you give her?

Photo of book by Marcos Ojeda

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