Drive-By Shooting Special: Go Smalley

Written by James - 19 Comments

Harry pushed the button and the window of the Solstice slid down, the wind ruffling his hair. The night air felt great, and he was in an unusually good mood. He didn’t even complain at James’ continual radio-station switching. “If you see someplace to stop for food, I’m buying,” he offered.

“I could go for a good steak, myself.” The cigarette dangling off James’ lip bobbed as he spoke. Eyes intent on the road, his hand reached for the radio buttons again, pressing until the thump of “We Will Rock You” came through the speakers.

They didn’t have to go too far before the blue and orange sign for came into view. Go Smalley, it read. With a name like that, it had to be a fun place – maybe even a sports bar where the boys could kick back and chill.

A few minutes later, the car was parked and they were heading for the door. James opened it… and suddenly a bouncer’s body filled the space.

He crossed his arms and looked down at them. “You on the list?”

Harry felt that good mood slipping away, the same way his dreams of kicking back after a steak dinner were slipping away. “List? What li-…”

James cut him off. “Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact we are.” Smooth as silk. “Chartrand and McLeod. Table for two.”

The bouncer frowned at his clipboard and shook his head. “I don’t see those names on here.”

James sighed with irritation. “Let me see that. We called earlier to reserve and were told we’d have no problems.”

“No problems?” The bouncer arched an eyebrow and checked the list again. “Ah. You’re right. We need to balance the gender ratio tonight. Go on in,” he shifted and let them pass.

Today’s hit is for Go Smalley, the site of Michael and Amy Smalley. Here’s what the site looked like when we drove by – uh, we mean… uh… after our drive-by and before we could take a screenshot (Michael’s fast!):

The restaurant was nothing that they expected. In fact, they weren’t sure it was a restaurant at all. Harry looked at the romantic atmosphere and small, intimate tables made only for couples and tugged at his collar. “This ain’t no sports bar, bro.”

Now, we played up this mistake for the post, but that’s a problem for the site – no one knows what “Go Smalley” stands for, and it’s not clear that the site is one for relationship advice.

The domain name is short and sweet, it’s easy to type and easy to remember. That’s great! But our mental associations with “Go Smalley” leap to “Go, Team!” We expect to see some sort of sports site or maybe a site to encourage Smalley on his endeavors. The domain name isn’t relevant to what you offer, which is relationship advice.

We do understand that your name is Smalley and that you want to personally brand the site, but unfortunately, that may not be the best idea. People who need relationship advice want it to be all about them, not all about you. Yes, be a leading expert, but how about a name like, “Get Back in Love, by relationship experts Michael and Amy Smalley”. (Just a suggestion.) Put people first, you second.

A hostess came to seat them, demurely drawing no attention to what she believed to be their… ahem… preferences. Love was love, after all. She led them across the floor to a small table of their own, one that had a dark blue tablecloth held down by a single candle in a jar.

All around them, couples were engaged in conversation. Harry and James could catch words like “dating”, “single”, “marriage”, “advice for parents…” But everyone was so quiet that the gentle discussions sounded like the sound of the sea.

That’s what your meta keywords represent – a gentle call lost in the sea of sites out there. Remember that you’re competing for attention with over 17 million sites, and many of those are using the same keywords you are. It’s a better idea to work with keyword phrases that are more targeted, specific and relevant.

For example, you have “dating”. How many other sites are using that? What about honing in and getting specific, such as “how to date in a marriage” or “dating advice for parents”?

[Editor's note - Michael clearly went through his keywords and spiced them up with far more relevant terms. Great job!]

James wanted a menu and there was none. There was just a card tucked into the candle holder and no sign of food at all – not even a tantalizing whiff. He raised his hand to signal the hostess and from somewhere, a bell rang.

All the couples got up and changed seats.

Harry’s eyebrows rose. “What the hell is going on?”

Good question. The meta description for your site, the description that visitors see when they do a search and your site link is returned, is terribly boring and bland. This is your first contact with potential visitors and it’s important to make a good impression. More than that, you want them to be interested enough to click your link and come visit.

Here’s what you have:

Michael and Amy Smalley and their expert advice on dating, marriage, parenting, and avoiding divorce. A marriage blog.

Well, so what? Another relationship blog… what makes yours special? Why should we click? What’ll we find beyond relationship advice? Get people excited and say, “Yeah! This is exactly what I need!”

[Editor's note - That's exactly what we'd say now too, considering the meta description has been revamped and switched up to something with more catchy impact. Nice.]

What James needed was someone to rescue him, and it looked like it’d be the friendly-looking brunette who’d come looking to exchange seats with Harry. The bell made sense now – speed dating.

When in Rome, do as the Romans, they say, and because the place was fairly nice, all soothing blue with an air of sophistication, they hung around, moving from table to table as well. The touch of creamy orange accents were just enough to punch up the place, and the whole affair felt professional.

That’s what we think of your site design. Soothing, nice, professional. The banner is simple and it works. It’s a nice mix of fonts that work well together.

The banner within the banner was a bit of a surprise, though – at first, we thought it was a Google Banner ad. It was only until we gave it a good look that we realized it was you two. You may want to opt for doing something a little different than that type of banner for clarity’s sake.

There’s very little clutter and everything is neatly laid out. The one thing we would suggest is to decrease the size of the image gallery in the main photo section on that home page. It’s taking up a huge amount of space and no one can see the captions well. (They can’t be seen at all on a 19″ screen.) Cut it down at least a quarter of the height.

[Editor's note - Michael chopped down the size of that image that was taking up the page. It's now nice and small, just the right size and not at all overwhelming. Good job!]

For the featured posts, we suggest using only 3 or 5 on the main page. Even better, take advantage of the original layout where the featured post comes first and is followed by smaller blocks of excerpts. Having so many post excerpts on the main page makes for endless scrolling. You want people to click and read, not scroll and scroll.

[Editor's note - Michael replaced the long list of excerpts with a shorter selection. Sneaky devil…]

It wasn’t too difficult to get into the swing of things. The bell rang, you followed the next number on the card, sat down for an eight-minute chat, and then the bell rang again, with everyone moving on. Harry talked about swords and archery with a few of the women, and James made some business deals that sounded lucrative. The girls drove a hard bargain, though.

Moving around is easy to do on your site as well. The navigation is great. It’s right at the top, all the essentials are there and visitors don’t have to guess where to go next.

Title tags are clear and we know before we click what we’ll find on various pages – except for Intensives. What’s that? Are we intensive? Are your courses intensive? Are these short courses? It’s a word not often used, so it may cause confusion. But, not a HUGE deal, so there you go.

[Editor's note - Alright, Michael. You changed that too, didn't you…Marriage Help it is. Cheers!]

Down the sidebar, now…

The sidebar is very wide, by the way. It could be pared back a touch.

The newsletter opt-in is very large, and that space looks empty, uninviting. It’s white and text, which doesn’t get any simpler than that. Also, the RSS that we typically expect to see here is the tiny icon version up in the banner – we suggest bringing that down into the opt-in area, increasing the size of the RSS and making that section more attractive with a nice RSS button.

Oops… you do have an RSS – a huge bar down below the fold, which is where most people don’t expect it to be.

The sidebar could use some shuffling around, actually. Move that nice, bold RSS above the fold to the top, then have the opt-in, and below that, have your ad.

[Editor's note - Obviously, Michael enjoyed our comments very much, because we can see he's applied each of them to his site. Don't they look better? We think so. Mmhm. Oops - except for that tag cloud. Trash that, it's dated and busy. By removing it, you'll also move your seller items below up higher - a good thing, overall.]

“…I really don’t get out much. This is my first time doing this kind of thing. What about you? You do this often? You should. You’re cute, y’know.”

Harry looked like a deer caught in the headlights as the woman across from him rambled on.

“What do you do for a living? You’re a Virgo, aren’t you… I can tell. I love Astrology. Hey, you look like you know style. Take a look at this.” She held up a hand. “I had my nails done this morning. What do you think of this shade of pink? Is it so me?”

So her. She was pretty, sure, but if the room was quiet, Harry was sure he’d be able to hear the wind blowing through her empty head.

And speaking of empty, so is the Social Life block in the sidebar. . If Twitter is the only social media used, give it a chunky button like the RSS to fill up that space.

Support and sponsors is fine. They look neat, appealing and clean, and they’re well placed.

For the lower left and right sidebars, pair two of these widgets side by side. Take the last two and put them in the small right sidebar widget column to even things out and remove that big white space on the right. Or, add a “recent posts” widget to the right, and make sure it displays enough links that the height is even to what you have on the left.

Speaking of Recent Posts, we always like to see links for this up higher – we suggest moving this whole area up above the Social Life and move the Social Life down.

[Editor's note - Alright. Michael made a bunch of changes here as well. As you'll notice, he took some of our advice and left the rest. We'd still really like to see links to recent posts on the side to help keep people reading.]

The content area is as clean as the rest of the layout. However, we suggest making the headlines sans serif for better readability. Adding thumbnails of images to the posts would help add some visual diversity and appeal, too.

[Editor's note - Done! Yes!]

Something was missing for Harry. It was nice to use eight minutes to meet someone, but it wasn’t enough to get to know the person to see if you liked her or not. It was over too fast. It wasn’t good. The conversations started out well enough, but… before he knew it, the bell had run and it was over.

That’s how we feel about the posts themselves. We were disappointed. We read a few excerpts, got interested, clicked to read more… and found that the excerpt WAS the post. There was really nothing more to read. A few are longer, but not long enough. A few posts also appeared as 404 errors.

We don’t usually critique the actual content of the posts themselves, but in this case, the site really would benefit from some in-depth information instead of a paragraph or two. The headlines and the excerpts were enough to get us curious, but when there wa nothing more to read, the content became a letdown.

For example, this post: “Do not, I repeat, do not waste your time in a relationship where there is intense fighting! Marriage never solves problems in dating.” We click to read more…and nothing. That’s frustrating to a reader. They’ll think, “Where’s the rest? I agree! I want to learn more! I want to know how to stop it and fix it! I have questions, and there aren’t any answers!”

There’s a ton of information on the topic, so give that to the readers. Expand the posts, pose some questions, give suggestions, tips and advice (because that’s what the site is about, right?) get people to respond in the comments and build up some community.

On a last note, the social media icons are small and washed out. They’re hard to notice and probably won’t get many clicks. Find a better plugin with clearer icons that are larger.

Overall, the site has a solid look on the surface. It’s a good theme, the layout and colors work well, it’s clean and uncluttered, but it falls short once we dive into the meat of it, which is the content. The informational pages are well thought out and information rich, so bring the posts up to that same standard as well.

Harry sat at his seat, waiting for the next woman to slide into it. Sure enough…

But the voice was male. “Hey there, sweetheart, come here often?” A pair of laughing eyes and a familiar grin met Harry’s startled eyes. James, joking around.

“You done? I’m so done. I have five potential projects for us in the works and there’s this one girl Sasha who has this great business we could work with and then I was talking to another woman who owns a blog network and then…” The rattling list of “what James did” went on and it was clear the night had been worthwhile – at least for business.

Harry grinned. “Yeah, let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough.” And just as he rose from his seat, his pager went off. A name flashed on the small screen, a small blip sounded as directions came in and…

“Another hit?” James waited, the serious look back on his face.

“Yep. C’mon. We gotta hit the road,” Harry grunted.

They left the couples and daters, unscathed, unharmed, and the restaurant intact. None would every know of the secret agents who’d sat amongst them – or how close they’d come to dating one of the smoking guns.

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