Drive-By Shooting Sundays: The Enhance Life

“What are you doing?”

James didn’t even look up. “Going green, dude.” The shovel he held struck the dirt and lifted some aside, leaving a nice hole.

Harry took in the scattering of gardening tools and supplies that littered the ground around James. “Really. Since when?”

“Since I decided I could make money selling organic potatoes.” He hitched his chin at an instruction book laying open on the grass.

“Okay, Farmer Brown.” Organic potatoes. Right.

Harry looked around the small garden James had created, a plot of earth with not much in it, and wondered if his partner in crime had finally lost his mind for good. He’d seemed fine during last week’s hit, but this… this was odd.

“We have a hit to do,” he reminded James.

“I’m busy.” Thunk. Scoop. The dirt overturned and a new hole appeared. “I’m on a shooting sabbatical.”

Today’s hit is for The Enhance Life, the blog of Shamelle. Here’s what the site looked like when we drove by:

There was a small blue sign hammered to the fence. “Hate to tell you, bro, but someone around here needs lessons in grammar. Shouldn’t that be ‘The Enhanced Life’? Or ‘Enhance Life’? Or even ‘Enhance Your Life?’ ‘The Enhance’ doesn’t make sense.”

No, it doesn’t. And that little problem was our first impression of the site. The title comes off as a typo, definitely cheaping down the perceived quality of the blog. It sticks out so much that it becomes a distraction.

James paused his shoveling and looked at the sign too. “Thanks for pointing that out. Now I can’t get it out of my head. But you’re missing the point.” He directed Harry’s attention to the small writing underneath.

Real Life Wisdom for Modern Life Growth

Well, it’s a tagline, but it doesn’t tell people much at all about why this matters. What do we get from reading this blog? Growing in a modern life? What does that mean? Will we be more rich? More successful? More modern? It’s too vague to tell us why we should hang around and have a read.

Not only that, whose wisdom are we talking about here? What does real life wisdom mean? And what’s the alternative? Non-real life? That tagline needs some help in a big way. Tell readers who this blog is for, what it’s about and why they should be reading.

“You know…” Harry eyed the blue sign with its cartoon font and fussy images. “You really shouldn’t dabble in graphic design, bro.” The sign looked cheap, the fonts were blurry and some of the text looked rough around the edges. The white outline around the lettering was thick and heavy. The tagline was squashed in and pushed over to the right.

“I didn’t make that. Found it.” James went back to digging.

“Well, make a better one,” Harry suggested. “At the very least, paint over those orange splotches.”

The RSS and email subscription icons really don’t belong in a banner. Everything is squashed enough as it is. Move them down into the sidebar above the search and give the banner elements some space. Then jazz up that banner. It really isn’t helping the site at all.

Harry walked around the garden. It was simple, square. There wasn’t many places to go. Navigating the plot basically meant sticking in one place. In short, it wasn’t very much fun.

And neither is the blog. It’s almost too simplistic. While there are links in the sidebar to click, we’re oddly not tempted to do so. It seems like there’s nowhere to visit, nothing curious or interesting that might attract our attention. Yes, there are a ton of links in the sidebar, but nothing compels us to click, and there’s nothing that catches our eye.

The Popular Posts list is long, so trim that down to five posts. You could move up the ad block to add some visual appeal (not that those ads look very appealing, but that’s certainly not your fault). We suggest having them two by two in a four-square layout, because placed as they are on that darker blue background next to the Adsense bar, it looks like there’s a hole in your sidebar.

Cut the Adsense widget down to three links as well. It’s long and tall. A better idea would be to change the block so that it fits the sidebar widthwise instead of being that vertical bar.

You could have Recent Comments below, but trim that down to three comments – for some reason, the block looks big and clunky.

Jamie’s garden looked clunky. Considering how keen an eye he had for what looked good and what didn’t, this plot of earth was a mess. Yes, the lines and rows he’d dug were well laid out and easy to follow, but the edge where the dirt ended and the green grass began were too straight. It wasn’t pretty – gardens should be appealing to the senses.

That’s a problem with this blog. The content is well formatted and easy to read with a good sized font and broken-up text. But the rest? It just isn’t pretty.

The blue in the banner doesn’t really match the shade of blue chosen for the background or the blue of the sidebar. There’s no blended feel of color scheme. The grey background of the site and the navigation bar doesn’t seem to fit well either. The light grey text of the content area is hard to read and just looks washed out. There’s an overall lack of oomph, period.

But… scroll all the way down to the footer and suddenly things start perking up. In fact, it looks worlds better than the rest of the site and the colors really work well. The thin and wispy blue font on the black background is hard to read, but a new design based off the color scheme would really put punch into the site.

“What the hell is this?” Harry pointed to some tools that James had left over to the side. Way over, where Harry had only spotted them at the last second and almost tripped on them.

“Well, those are going to help me make money,” James commented easily, as if it was plain for everyone to see.

What isn’t plain for everyone to see is exactly what you have in the footer. Why is an Amazon widget so far down the page that no one will ever see it? Why are those colorful images tucked away in the closet like that? Why are the Category links where no one will ever visit?

Get that stuff back up where it belongs. Have categories either in your navigation or sidebar. Put the Amazon above the fold or as near to it as possible. Get those images in your posts to add some visual appeal to your site.

“Bro?” Harry gently put a hand on Jamie’s arm, stopping the next shovel-scoop from happening. “Put that thing down.” He reached down to snag the book, showing it to James. “This isn’t about making money online.”

“What do you mean?” James frowned.

“Look. It says right here in the About the Author section.” Harry’s finger pointed to two words: Personal development.

“Oh, well, hell!” James threw his hands up in the air and the shovel thunked to the ground. “Why didn’t somebody tell me?”
Want more? You got it. Check out the lineup of upcoming hit jobs:

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
December 14 – Linkers Blog

Note: We’ve closed requests for free drive-bys on our blog until January 2009. We’ll start taking names again in December for January’s hits. Thanks everyone!

Want your blog shot down? 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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