New Reader Review request please

[Andy Roberts]

Hi All,
I still haven't managed to get a "New Reader Review" for one of the early days in 31DC so I wondered if there's anybody here who can spare ten minutes or so to do a usability check and critical first impression on my blog please.

http://distributedresearch.net/blog

Cheers

Andy

[Christine Martell]

Here you go Andy
http://www.screencast.com/t/GrQpa0kXhC

Hope you get something out of it......it's harder to have lots to offer with mature blogs!

[Andy Roberts]

Hi Christine, thanks for this. I've also published a link to your screencast and responded on my blog as below:

Many thanks for the screencast Christine, you gave me several things to think about and work on there. That was a great way to communicate about a blog's functionality and hopefully took up a bit less of your time than typing up a critique. You also hit the nail exactly on the head straight away by exposing the central problem that I'm grappling with - the combination of several seemingly unrelated themes or niches into one blog. The only thing that ties them altogether is the common author, myself. So I have diverse target audiences, apart from the very small audience that may be interested in me, friends and family so to speak. So I'm always trying to isolate the categories and pages into slices that can be consumed on their own. What I discovered from Google Analytics is that certain individual posts can gain an audience of their own, coming from the search engines and then moving onwards. This is in fact how I've started to derive a small income from the blog, to recoup expenses, through some individual posts in the archive. But a series of individual disconnected posts does not a blog make. Which is why I set myself the goal of increasing RSS subscriptions and joined in the current 31daystoabetterblog group, to see if I can bring it all together a bit more. One thing I'm considering is to see if I can provide a selection of RSS feeds for the main categories. That's better than having separate blogs, although I do have some of those as well!

Action points from the critique:

• Explain Social objects at the beginning of the jump-off page

• Tweak the RSS "Full" panel ( built in to theme)

• Explore moving the comments link ( also theme)

• Keep grappling with the challenge of serving unrelated niches

Is it time to consider changing themes? Probably not in the middle of all this other activity.

Thanks again Christine for giving great feedback.

Oh, and I've also wondered about the feeling of being 'watched' and spotlighted by mybloglog as we surf around each other's blogs, not at all anonymously. I suppose we are assumed to have taken that on board when we join that service. I've tried three of these type of things and ditched the other two. I also upgraded mybloglog for the better stats, which I find very useful in combination with Google Analytics.

[Christine Martell]

Glad it was helpful. You are right in that it is faster to do a screencast, and that way you get to actually see my responses. It's more like a live review.

I will also say, I get a lot out of it for my own blog too. Its so much easier to spot things on someone else's blog. I find myself recognizing things to improve in my own at the same time. Now I just need to find the time to make the changes.

I also find I get different info from MyBlogLog. I go back and forth between the paid and free. Glad I'm not the only one who finds the widget creepy :)

[Andy Roberts]

I think you were wondering about the sitemap page, listed by category. This is generated by Dagon Design Sitemap generator plugin for WordPress.

[Christine Martell]

Great, thanks Andy. Always wondered how to do that.....

[Michele Martin]

Hi Andy--I'm not as fancy as Christine with the screencasts, but here are a couple of my initial thoughts/impressions:

I think that your blog has a very clean, professional look and feel and the photos make it very inviting. One thing that struck me was the range of interests and blog posts represented there. On the one hand I think that they're all great because they are all pieces of you and your passions. On the other hand, as a reader, unless I know you personally, I'm likely to come to your blog because I'm interested in a particular topic or thing you write about and those interests are eclectically spread throughout the blog, making it harder for me to connect to them. I think it helps that you have the tabs at the top obviously that drive people to different parts of your blog, but I might not make it past the home page if I don't get something that really grabs me about it.

What is your primary goal in maintaining your blog? That might help narrow things a bit. I found that for myself, the more focused I could get so that people "get" what I'm writing about, the better I seem to do with my stats and readership.

[Andy Roberts]

Thanks Michele,

I don't really have a primary goal, I have several as you noticed, but the main ones would be (unordered)

* to act as a single online profile for when I participate in various online communities such as this one. It also helps as a dynamic CV
* to act as a repository for various articles or posts which attract search engine traffic that converts into an income.
* to learn by communicating

Your remarks have inspired two thoughts.

Would it be more sensible if this blog was rebranded as simply "Andy Roberts blog" rather than purporting to be about one type of thing, and then also being about lots of other things as well. But the domain name is working ok for me.

For a web visitor or reviewer, the page tabs at the top are very prominent and yet they don't necessarily represent the major categories, which are in a sidebar widget. This may not be the best way to use pages.

[Michele Martin]

Hi Andy---I think that your two organizational ideas are perfect. They would make it easier to navigate and focus, at least for me.