Drive-By-Shooting Sundays: Ulla Hennig’s WebBlog

Berlin. What a beautiful assignment. The call had come in, he’d listened to the details with his usual quiet, and then he’d told James the news with a huge grin.

James arched an eyebrow. “You’ve been watching too much History Channel lately.”

“No, come on, are you kidding me?” Harry was already packing. “Berlin is the perfect place for intrigue and subterfuge. It’s right up your alley, Jamie.” The city’s name alone brought up images of black trench coats, slick fedoras and irresistible femme fatales.

“You could be right.” Okay, so he’d been watching the documentaries too, and yeah, Berlin sounded cool as hell. He liked the small shops they’d hit up recently, like last week’s hit, but a European city… oh yeah. “World jet-setters, shooting it up… I like,” James nodded. No jeans for this hit.

A few days later, the two men stood outside of the photography studio on the windswept street, Berlin all around them. Harry’s face fell.

This week’s hit is Ulla Hennig’s Weblog, the photoblog and musings of Ulla Henning. Here’s what the site looked like when we drove by:

The storefront looked plain and unimpressive, the sign above it bland and blue. Harry wasn’t quite sure they were going to get into the kind of excitement he’d been expecting.

The sign’s title was eaten up by the gradation of blues, there was no visual impact, and there was nothing to convey this site was about photography. The streaks did nothing to make the shop look high-end or impressive. It came off as just another place amidst all the others around, topped by a blue smear.

“I don’t get it, James.” He shook his head. “Why is it that the most creative people have the most unremarkable sites?”

Jamie’s eyes were narrowed analytical slits, and he coolly started walking across the street. “I don’t know. But maybe it’s just a front.” Who knew? He’d certainly find out, though.

As they entered the building, there were two small tables on either side of the door. Both had brochures, but nothing incited James to pick one up, and he chose to browse the empty room instead.

Harry did grab a brochure, though, only because he was trying to figure out this puzzle of creative blandness. He sighed. The text was way too small

That’s a problem. On the left-hand sidebar, the small text in the sidebars with lists of category links stacked on top of the other make the eye see each group of links as a single block, and that discourages clicking.

Make the sidebar fonts bigger and give those category links some space. Make them count, help people find what you have to offer. There are also a few too many categories on display, and we suggest cutting the list down to 7 or 9 links at the most.

The Archives section is a bit better, and the borders help to separate the links, but archives isn’t what people want to click. We suggest making this a dropdown list.

Even better, remove the Archives from the sidebar and put them in the main navigation.

The little Blog Catalog button is unnecessary and adds nothing to the site. We suggest removing that.

On the right-hand sidebar, the Meta is completely unimportant to site visitors and should be removed. The Blogroll only has one link – oh, no wait, there’s two links there, but again, because they’re jammed together, it comes off as one link only.

One huge problem is that there’s so little to attract people and keep them on your site that you may end up losing visitors as they click that blogroll to go visit somewhere else that might be more interesting.

“What the hell is this place?” James looked confused. There was nothing at all, no reason for this building. The walls were bare, the place just looked blue and he was almost wishing they’d had a pub to shoot up instead. At least he could’ve had a beer while taking shots.

Shots were what he was going to start taking right now. The Glock came out without a second thought, and he took aim.

“This goes.” He shot a small pair of orange signs on the wall. RSS, they said. Too small, too invisible, and too low down on the sidebar. The shot rang out and orange shreds of paper fluttered in the air.

“This goes.” A search bar was next on the list. There was no need for it, because there really was nothing to search through at all. The plaster of the walls spat out small pebbles from the bullet’s path.

Then he stopped. “Do we have a sledgehammer?”

Harry blinked. “Um, no, James. We don’t.” Thought the place could use one. The three-room building didn’t even need the extra space, and knocking out a wall for a two-room concept would’ve been a smart idea.

“Don’t shoot for a second, okay?” While James stood waiting, Harry moved past to explore a bit more. There was a sign in the small antechamber that had a text about the building’s owner, but the font was small and hard to read there as well, so he gave up.

He searched for photos, images… something that would match with the shop’s sign outside. ‘Photos and Musings’ it had proclaimed, but there were barely any photos about, and no gallery room to back up the building’s purpose.

Harry did find some photos, and yes, they were very lovely, but they weren’t on display as they should be. The text that described each was hard to read – and he could see that was the norm by now. It was a shame; some of the descriptive content and stories about the images could have been really nice to read.

As it was, he wasn’t encouraged to stay. And by now, Harry was beginning to think James had been right. This building was just a front.

“James?”

There hadn’t been anything dangerous about this hit, because there wasn’t anything there to start with. That should’ve been their first tipoff that something was wrong. Hits should never be too easy.

“James. We need to go.” Harry’s footsteps took on a sense of urgency and he walked back through the rooms. James looked confused, but Harry didn’t care, and he grabbed the man’s arm to pull him out.

“What the-… Hey, cut it out,” James yanked his arm back.

“No, come on. Now, James.” Harry snagged James again and this time, he pulled hard, almost dragging him towards the door. “You were right – it’s a fake. Let’s go, now!”

The urgency hit James, and suddenly he was the one urging Harry along. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” They hit the door and burst out onto the street –

…just as the building behind them exploded, throwing both men to the ground while fiery rubble rained around them.

When the splintered wood and chunks of plaster had finally stopped showering the boys, James chanced lifting his head, a wide-eyed expression of surprise on his face.

“Wow.” He slowly twisted to look back at the hit that was no more. “There’s your intrigue and subterfuge, bro…”

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

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 for now and will 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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