Drive-By-Shooting Sundays: Lit Guides

Summer was slipping into autumn and another year was slowly winding down. It would be back to school for many students in just a few short days. Nights were getting cooler and James noticed the leaves on the trees changing colors. “Fall seems to come earlier every year, doesn’t it?”

Harry just nodded. When he had lived back east, he always noticed the touch of yellow in the foliage before anyone else. But since he’d moved to the desert, James was the first between them to see it coming.

Still, despite his wistful thoughts, he was glad to be back after last week’s hit. The yacht had been luxurious, but there was no place like home.

The bag at Harry’s feet got another check and then he zipped it up. Theirs was the only car near the park. Dusk was falling and most people were home eating supper. A single brownstone building stood on the far edge of the green. The school was empty now, but in a few days, it should be filling with students. The building was unlocked, innocently unaware of the devastation to come.

“Ready?” Harry glanced at James.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” James grinned back.

Today’s hit is for Lit Guides, the blog of Kristen Galles. Here’s what the site looked like when we drove by:

“It’s very clean.” James stood inside the main room of the building while Harry poked around in a few nearby file cabinets. The whole appearance of the site was one of order, and there was a beautiful lack of clutter. The rooms felt subdued and welcoming – easy on the eyes.

“Well, that’s subtle.” Harry had his hands on his hips and he was staring at the painting above the door.

James glanced over at his partner. “What is?”

“This header,” Harry pointed to the painting where the lighter brown scooped under the RSS subscriptions notice. “It looks like the tab on a file folder. Huh.” That was an interesting touch – sometimes flashy wasn’t needed, and functional and nice were more important. In this case, the design worked well.

“Have you figured out what this place is about?” James moved to the window and twitched the curtain aside. The park was still empty and the waiting getaway car looked lonely.

“Yeah, it’s right here.” Harry pointed to the sign’s tagline. “Clear enough?”

“No ellipses required.” That was one thing. “Resources on what?” That was the other issue.

Yes, the tagline tells people who this site is for and what it’s about, but it’s very vague. Teaching resources? Homework help? Study methods? Book discussions? Target more effectively and be extremely clear on what your site offers. Use benefits. What will I get if I read your site? Will I be smarter? Relieved? Less frustrated? Have more time? What?

Ahh, but look here – you have all this information… hidden on the About page:

LitGuides.com is designed to help teachers, students, and parents be even more effective by getting the most out of their education through great curriculum kits, interesting links, mentoring help, and much more.

Make this clearly evident on your home page, otherwise you’ll have people guessing at the ambiguous purpose of the site.

Harry went back to examining the room and its layout. Everything was in its place, and nothing was tucked away and hiding at all. Rooms were well laid out and he could walk around them easily.

The navigation is easily visible and we really like its look. It could use one clearer title – what’s a Buy Guide?. Also, if your site is for students, teachers and parents, then why do you only address “For Parents” in the navigation? Where’s the “For Students” and the “For Teachers?”

Also, reorder the navigation slightly. The “About” page should be at the end, either before or after “Contact”. (Good on you for having that contact page.) The “For Parents” should possibly be just after home, and the rest of the pages in between that and the “Contact” page.

The sidebar above the fold is really nice. The Search, Archives and Categories are all together in a neat tabber box, giving visitors what they need and keeping the options nicely above the fold. Recent posts are there too, and the RSS is easily accessible at the top of the banner. Well done!

“Looks like all the important stuff is right where it should b– Whoa!” Harry jumped back from the filing cabinet as if something had bit him.

“What?” James came over quickly. “Are you alright?”

Harry rubbed his arm, but he was watching the corner warily. “I’m fine. Just watch out for those Buy Now buttons.”

“Wow.” James peered into the area with a bit of an amazed look. “Yeah, no kidding.”

The minute we dip below the fold, that’s where all hell breaks loose. The sleek design is gone, replaced with cheap looking buy now buttons and scary big fonts in bright red.

The “Buy Now” buttons are too much. Sure, you want to encourage people to buy, but with that many buttons in a row and the bright red fonts, the tastefulness of the site is completely eradicated.

Why not create banner ads or images that lead to the product pages? Rotate them each week. Have an ad block instead of this list, maybe six ads that you can switch out to keep the offerings fresh. You already have the two Amazon squares, so add a few more (no more than six and we feel that four is plenty) and then get rid of those buy now buttons.

Another idea is to create a page just for products people can buy. If selling is that important to this site, then make it easy for people to buy. Get that garbage out of the sidebar and create a nice page where you sell affiliate products that you feel are relevant to your niche and helpful to visitors. (And if they aren’t, don’t sell them. Period.)

Ditch the extra “free email updates” in the sidebar – that’s redundant. You already have it in the banner. Also ditch the extra Amazon search. You have enough Amazon going on and this is just overkill.

The Adsense ads aren’t very appealing either, and while we understand wanting to put them up, take a look at whether they’re really working for you. If you feel they are and you want to keep them, switch the background color from grey to white to stay in line with your clean theme.

“You know, it’s too bad,” James put his hands on his hips and looked around the room. “I feel gyped. This place looks so peaceful and inviting. I got the feeling I’d learn something… but that’s just on the surface. There’s something waiting to bite you from underneath.”

Harry wasn’t impressed anymore either. Thankfully, the clutter doesn’t extend all the way down the page. “What’s this do?” He poked at the Site Meter icon, a tiny little gadget far below.

James looked over his shoulder. “Nothing.” The meter served no more purpose than amusing the owner and it wouldn’t be any good to visitors. If something was for the owner’s use, then it should stay that way – unless there were incredible stats to brag about. Otherwise, it just added up the clutter.

What both men noticed was that the rest of the spic-and-span site (that is, spic and span after they left the salesy area) looked untouched. Too pristine. There was hardly any trace of life.

“Doesn’t anyone come here?” James squinted at the room they’d peeked into, noticing how ready it was but that it looked undisturbed.

“Well, three people came by,” Harry pointed to the guest book lying in wait, three small comments jotted down.

With the low level of activity going on, this indicates that you may not be pushing the marketing of your blog, thinking that if you build it, people will come. Not so, in the blogosphere. If you want to attract people, you need to go find them and tell them about this place. Bring them over. Get active. Promote the place.

Boost up your SEO, too. You have some meta going on, but it’s not very good or very effective. Laser target what you want to be found for and add more keywords. Also, rewrite that meta description – it’s not enough to get people to be interested or click through with that short line of text.

James grabbed a book and started flipping through the pages, squinting at the serif font mixed with easier-to-read sans serif and wincing at the bolded words that kept leaping out at him. “Ugh.” He snapped the book closed and tossed it aside.

Tossed aside is what will happen with this content, because it’s very hard to read. Pick one style of font and stick to it. Don’t use those bolded words unless you have good reason to do so. Lay off the huge quotes, because it’s just added clutter and doesn’t help, or make them smaller so that they don’t pull all the focus away from the quotes themselves. Don’t use a bunch of different colors in your content – it’s more eye clutter and hard to keep track of.

In fact, the biggest issue with the content is the opposite of huge big blocks of text: over-formatting. There’s so much going on, lists, bullets, numbers, quote images, italics, colors… it’s all too much. Find the happy balance between formatting and a nice read.

The “About” page is a perfect example of how too much is just damaging. On landing on that page, our first instinct was to click away. The page is terribly long, and it’s not about YOU or why you’re doing this site. It’s a sales page. More “buy me!” screaming at people. No. No no. Take that out of there and be genuine. This isn’t the page to be selling, and again, a better idea is to have a sales page.

“Would you stop that?” Harry snapped. James had taken out his gun and the silencer and was playing target practice with objects around the room, taking pot shots at this or that. “You’re being silly.”

“No I’m not.” James stood facing the wall and whirled around to shoot like some cowboy out of Tombstone. “It’s good practice.”

“It’s undignified.” Harry put his hands on his hips and looked around at the multiple holes on the wall that James had left. The holes gaped, there was plaster on the floor and dust was filling the air. “You’re making a mess.”

James stopped shooting. He stood there staring at one of the pictures, a beautiful tree with a natural ladder winding up its trunk. (See the last photo on the About page).

Stopping fun to stare? That puzzled Harry. “What are you doing?”

“I want that.” James could imagine climbing up to the tops of the branches. “I want one just like-” And his head turned to the main door. “What was that?”

Harry’s head whipped around. Someone was coming in, the main door opening.

“Go!” he hissed, scooping up the bag and leaping over a chair in the way. He ran down the hall. James pounded behind him, and they burst out the emergency exit to clatter down the back stairs like students on the lam.

Want more? You got it. Check out the lineup of upcoming hit jobs:

September 7 – Miramar Mike 2.0
September 14 – Green Plan(t)
September 21 – Fawnskin Flyer
September 28 – Forty Plus Two
October 5 – The Enhance Life
October 12 – Creative Texture Tools
October 19 – Ulla Hennig’s Weblog
October 26 – Simplistic Thoughts
November 2 – Positioning Strategy
November 9 – Sushi Day
November 16 – The D Spot Redux
November 23 – The Antisocial Social Worker
November 30 – Writer Dad
December 7 – Deaf Mom World.

Want your blog shot down? Sign up in the comment section for your free drive-by, and we’ll schedule you in.Or hit us up for a private drive-by via email. It’s only $30, and you’ll get your shoot-out within a week.

Come on. You know you wanna.

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