This morning I woke up covered in (figurative) blood.
I had just been the target of James and Harry (of Men with Pens‘s fame) Drive-by Shooting Sundays.
The rather colorful and fluffed-up setup is actually a lookover consultation of the blog from the eyes of trained online buisness men.
While I knew that the Blog could be improved, I must say that my Ego was somewhat bruised (As often happens with brutal honesty my buddy Graham would say).
I think that part of their criticism comes from the fact that they were cold called on the blog and know nothing of what I was about (except that I was a gamer) so they evaluated the blog from that stand point.
Regardless, all their observations hit true to a certain extent.
Here are a few key observations (Read the whole post here):
Hm. I’m not sure what to think of a first impression. Personally, I’m not big on cartoons. I think cartoons should be used sporadically and be well illustrated to convey a message without downgrading the seriousness. (Is gaming serious? Damned straight it is.)
I pointed out in the comments that the Cartoon is actually a caricature of me. I don’t think I’m going to surprise anyone by saying that the blog’s branding turns around a certain Chatty guy… (I’ve even been accused, quite nicely, to foster a burgeoning personality cult… what? I’d never do this to my minions!)
The banner title is fuzzy, so that should be cleaned up to be sharper. Harry finds the comment bubbles interesting and I hate them, so it’s a toss up on that, too.
That is something I might have to take up with the Artist that made the banner. I didn’t mind it when I got it, but I’ve had more than one feedback on it. With 4e’s publication, I think I’ll commission Veronica for an update.
The tagline gets lost in the banner and isn’t visible at all. Who is Chatty DM? Why should I read these musings? What’s this site about anyways? It does tell readers what the site is about – your quest. But again, why should I read this site?
With 4e’s publication, the tagline will lose it’s meaning. I’m probably going to change it with ‘Where the Rule of Cool meets the Rule of Fun in Tabletop RPGs’ or something.
The comment count should be at the bottom of posts to allow readers to read and then click immediately to comment without having to scroll back up.
That’s actually a very good point. Maybe I’ll ask Graham to hack this bit when he’s done with his finals.
The main problem seems to be that the overall color theme is bland. There’s nothing really wrong with it, but it’s… forgettable. There’s nothing interesting to capture readers at a glance and no punch to the page.
This is where I disagree (as often happens in artistic decisions), I quite like the soft, bland colors because I wanted a relaxed atmosphere. When we discussed colors, it was suggested quite early on that we’d move away from the current color schemes and go for different… I think that once again the suggestion comes from a ‘I’m a first time visitor that dropped from a search result… make sure I stick around’ which is a valid point… although I’m guessing my growth comes more from word of mouth than from random walk ins.
There you have it… your friendly Chatty’s head has exploded and for once I had to use my minions’ cloning banks for myself. I’ll have my revenge, MWa HA HA HA!
Still, I’ll look into this more and start planning for Chatty DM’s 4.0.
Mm.
If your goal is to get thousands of readers and hundreds of comments each day, then I suppose some sort of consultation is appropriate.
But the comments on “who is this Chatty DM? Why should I care about his musings?” made me grin. Apparently, the assumption here is that people jump on to Google and search for blogs they might be interested in, and judge by the title…
In my experience, nobody actually does that. The way you typically decide to start reading someone’s blog is by finding a reference to it on someone else’s blog. You read a few posts, and you decide whether to stick around or not. At least that’s the way I do it, and I’d be staggered if I was any sort of unusual example there – and if I’m the norm, rather than the exception (which I expect I am), then the title of your blog is utterly irrelevant, is it not?
Gazza: It was free… free advice (when asked for) can always be useful (although I have a friend that say that a (Insert favorite sexual method of intercourse) is better than a good piece of advice).
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…
I’ve actually been burned by your theme’s placement of the comments link 🙂
I’ll take issue with their whine about the faded / slightly blurry test bubbles. You designer was using the text as design elements, not as a method of conveying information. Also the cartoony complaint is just personal preference on their part. If you like it screw em 🙂
Buzzregog’s last blog post..Wonder if Paizo will get credit for this..
Here’s what will change if I can :
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.
Comments link is both at the top and bottom now.
*hugz Phil* I made you a pretty picture on my blog to commemorate your shooting. 🙂
Geek’s Dream Girls last blog post..Mistakes Geeks Make in Online Dating Profiles: Verbosity!
Until about a month ago, I hadn’t heard about your blog. Then I read a favorable comment about it on another blog and checked out your site, read a few posts, liked your content, and bookmarked it. Now I check in every 2-3 days and read what’s new. I didn’t find you from a google search, and I had a basic expectation of whay your site would be about before I clicked on the link.
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.
(I just rebuilt a Mac we were given, a eMac… and since both my kids occupy the house desktops I thought I’d experience a Mac firsthand… I’m a strictly PC user… ack I can’t login… the bottom nav bar is broken in Safari!)
@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
I’ll change the Tagline to be less nerdy and more informative.
But…
but…
I thought it was clever…
Is less nerdy really something that your target audience needs/wants/appreciates?
Michael Phillipss last blog post..
Sigh… Your are the second to mention something to that effect…
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!
Oh, the first part was mostly a joke. I don’t have any problem with a changing subtitle. Hell, my favorite online essayist switches the subtitle of his website regularly. I was just wondering if the part of the motive for change, “to put up something less nerdy” was appropriate to this crowd. By the time you go searching for DMing blogs, you have embraced both your inner nerd and your inner geek and begun the long and arduous path to forging them into a single unified whole. If, on the other hand, you really want it to be more informative, that’s a good reason for change (though you already have an “about the site” subpage, which anyone who actually spends the time to parse an informative subtitle will probably read as well.
(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..
Actually I will most probably change my tagline to fit my branding better (i.e. Something about the rule of cool or tropes, or leave it as is I don’t know yet)
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.
Any advice is helpful, point in fact: your reviews help us out greatly, however the context it comes from is important. I don’t really agree with anything that the other blog says. It seems to be mostly hasty nitpicking put together in order to review something they have little idea about. If their main goal is to review site design that is fine, IANAGD, but I’m not sure their site design grabs me that much. It seems to me more like their blog is based off of reviewing other site design, to generate links back to itself . . .
eh.
Now, if you asked them to do it, then it is an ENTIRELY different story.
John: I think that when I got into the review of Silvervine (sorry for the extended break) I took an initial standpoint of a client of the game. As I dug deeper, I shifted a bit to a designer’s point of view, taking cues form other similar products I had read. In that optic, had I done a drive-by shooting review the game a lot of the comment would have been construed as hasty and too high level.
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.
For what it’s worth…
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
If it was requested then they should nit pick away. From a designer’s perspective I’m sure there are valid concerns or things to look at, but there is a designer’s perspective and anal retentiveness, and a viewer’s perception. I know I get retentive about writing code, and any writing I do in general, when often times there is no appreciable difference to the end user. I think the thing that I disliked most came from not knowing that it was requested, because criticizing someone else’s site to that detail just seems one step too far, and I’ve never been a fan of bad or pretentious ways of generating web traffic.
@Bob: Thanks for the kind words on both sites. I think I was asking for it a bit by seeking advice from professional writers for a blog that’s hobby related. So the proverbial grain of salt has been taken.
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…
I liked your idea for a new tagline (“Where the Rule of Cool meets the Rule of Fun in Tabletop RPGs”), but I’d drop “in Tabletop RPGs”. It’s redundant. If the reader see’s “DM” in the title and doesn’t get that this blog is about roleplaying games, then they probably won’t know what “RPGs” stands for, let alone what a “tabletop RPG” is. If you want to work on your branding, maybe go with something like “Where the Rule of Cool meets the Rule of Fun, and other RPG tropes”.
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.
-Kameron-
At least it then tabs to website. Nothing is missed, they are just done out of order.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..remembered one of the things I’d intended to say.
Kameron –
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.