Yeah, it’s an issue with the Javascript that the anti-spam plugin uses to place the field. We’ll have to look into how to fix it one of these days.

Michael Phillipss last blog post..remembered one of the things I’d intended to say.

FYI, you need to change the tab order of the fields in the comment form. It jumps to the Anti-spam word instead of Website after the Email field.

Of course, now that I have conflicting points of view regarding how nerdy the banner’s tagline should be (not a big controversy!)… I can live with that.

@John: I would not have written the post the same way if the review was unasked for and took that tack…

The boys over at Men With Pens are good at what they do. They know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to blog design. Are all of their suggestions and observations useful? Nope. Are some right on the mark? Yep.

It’s nice to have an unbiased set of eyes look at your blog. They did a drive-by on my writing blog here and I used some of the advice and dropped other parts.

Phil, you’ve got a good thing going here. Making some small suggested changes can only improve what you’re doing and strengthen your brand. Good form for handling the constructive criticism from Harry and James so well!

Bob at DnDReviewss last blog post..How To Kill Your D&D Game Without Really Trying

I did ask them to do it… I expected to be told that most of it was fine… and it is for my needs (and my perceived needs of the readers). What counts is that we will focus on the suggestions that make sense to implement like easier to see RSS buttons and the Comment button that was copied to appear at the bottom of a post now.

eh.

Now, if you asked them to do it, then it is an ENTIRELY different story.

One thing we never got around to implement is that there’s supposed to be another chat bubble sitting in the empty space left of Cartoon Chatty where I would be able to post Twitter like one liners.

That’s where I want to put all the nerd stuff!!!

And I will… as soon as we get it up and find either a randomizer script or a way I can edit it without breaking the theme’s template with my clumsy non-coder fingers and absent CSS skills.

(Honestly? I think that your blog’s main title is informative enough for anyone with the specialized skill set to benefit from the majority of this blog.)

Heh, time for weekly “dive into shaky metaphor” minute.
Sometimes it is a good idea to clarify and make a product more generally accessible.

Hum. I was at 500 words and the metaphor wasn’t done. Delete.

2nd edition AD&D was sort of random, often internally inconsistent, and a fairly arcane set of rules to learn. This, of course, made it hugely popular among those of us who like arcane rules sets. (Well I liked them better back in the early 90s than I do now, but…) It also made it hard to sell the game to the general public, even the parts of the general public that would be interested in fantasy role playing. All it had going for it was a big player base and the fact that it was less insanely complicated and nonsensical than most of its competitors.
3rd edition and 3.5 simplified the rules, got rid of the vast majority of subsystems and special rule3s (much like 2nd ed did to its own predecessor, 1st edition) and made the game more approachable for the newbie. This is a case of positive appeal broadening.

On the other hand, let’s say that you have a product like, I don’t know, the Dev C++ IDE. It is a specialist tool for people with a decent amount of knowledge in a specialist field. It is also reasonably user friendly (sort of like AD&D 2 vs AD&D1) But it is much less intuitive than say MS Word. By the time you need an IDE, you should be familiar enough with computers to not need or particularly want it to behave like software for the general computer user. Broadening its user appeal? Probably not a great idea. The people who need it are likely already attracted to its features and interface, and the people who don’t need it aren’t going to want it no matter how pretty and easy to use you make it.

Your case doesn’t map to either of these situations of course. Metaphor never works like that (well I have a few friends from the old Philosophy department who would say that all language is metaphor and there are thus metaphors that work with nearly one to one correlation with the real world. Things like “The dog is brown.” But that’s a nitpicky silly point.) I think that your tag line might be more like Dev C++ than AD&D 2nd edition.

Michael Phillipss last blog post..

Okay okay, I’m not changing anything before having slept on it and asking the readers in a poll of something…

I could go with something extremely nerdy instead!

Michael Phillipss last blog post..

@e: Awesome pic! I shall borrow it for sure! Thanks again for your post on your side!

@Spiralbound: Welcome on the blog! The general consensus of the readers is that the comment link needed to be moved. It was done. I added a Share this plugin (the others I used broke the blog) and it’s a nice addition.

The other consensus is that James took a ‘random walk-in’ approach based on thier usual service. In hindsight, it might not be completely appropriate for a Niche blog but I’m really am not angry about anything they said.

Apart from the cartoon thing, thier suggestions are good if I’d like to snag random readers that find my blog because they wrote ‘Is Pathfinder good’ in thier google search.

Hey It was free and I asked for it so I’m not dissing on them…

Thanks again for the frank feedback Spiralbound!

ChattyDMs last blog post..Comments broken? now fixed

Here’s my take on the advice you received.

Their suggestions for additions to your site are decent, not mind-blowing, but worth experimenting with. As for their criticisms, this is where they fall down and show the inherent weakness of their “drive-by” approach.
1) fuzzy title. It is? (scroll) oh yeah, it is… so what? This is so minor that I wasn’t even aware of it until they pointed it out!
2) text balloons. I remember seeing them when I first visited and just thought they were visual representations of the “chatty” part of you being the chatty GM. I didn’t even bother to try and read them, treating them as a background element only.
3) cartoons at beginning… What? Are they referring to the cartoon of you at the top right? Don’t they have something better to comment on? One, it’s a purely visual aspect of the site in a non-intrusive area. Two, it’s cute and suites the overall theme well. Lastly, this comment, “Because the cartoon is of a man, though, it may peg the site as gender biased – no women allowed.” is a vacuous and trite comment made by someone who is obviously grasping at straws for something “insightful” to say about a site aspect that in reality is undeserving of any commentary. It’s OBVIOUSLY a caricature of you, not the intended reader. When has a site layout EVER included a cartoon representation of the “allowed readership”?
4) color scheme. It’s not bland and boring, it’s non-intrusive and allows me to focus in the content… this is a BAD thing? Background colors should be in the BACKground, don’t change it.
5) comments link. Having just made a comment, I can attest that this suggestion was correct, the current placement isn’t the best.

This is a blog. Not an e-commerce site. People come here for the content, not to be suavely sold on a product. Much of their criticism is better suited to a site that NEEDS to have as slickly professional an image as possible, not a site that relies upon the text as written to maintain it’s readership. Where are the comments about WHAT you’re saying rather than how the top banner looks… It looks like they gave your site a VERY quick once-over and threw some formulaic advice at you. They appeared to be more concerned with ensuring that their blog post was impressively and thematically written than with giving you quality advice. While there were some worthy ideas for you to try out, you pretty much got what you paid for with the bulk of their post.

Geek’s Dream Girls last blog post..Mistakes Geeks Make in Online Dating Profiles: Verbosity!

Comments link will go after post.

I’ll change the Tagline to be less nerdy and more informative.

I’m adding a few of the plugins they suggest and see how it goes.

I’ll need to review my stance on ads soon, Project wonderful is not all that worth it so far (I get about 20-30 cents a day with 6 ads). Text links and sponsorship will probably be the way to go to recover my costs.

Thanks for the feedback Buzz… the comment thing is a top priority… damn I need to learn to code these things… I’m going to have to buy Graham a XBox 360, RockBand and a few bottles of Whiskey.

Buzzregog’s last blog post..Wonder if Paizo will get credit for this..

I don’t aim at getting a gazillion readers. I really don’t think the RPG blog readers market is that large (Martin Rayla hit the 2000 page views per day at his peak and a lot of these were re-visits… I sit between 500 and 1000 currently).

(Hey you cut the last part already?)

I’m a tweaker, always was always will be. So listenting to outsiders for advice is one way… Soon enough I’ll turn the mike to the readership and get their thoughts on it too…