ProBlogger Community Consultation Review

Not long ago we decided to participate in ProBlogger’s Community Consultation whereby hundreds of ProBlogger readers had the opportunity to critique Marketme.com and offer their advice to make our blog better. Brandi and I felt that putting ourselves out there and inviting feedback would be the best way to gauge our progress thus far and whether or not we were on the right track.

We received over 10,000 words of advice and suggestions on what we could do to make Marketme.com a better blog for our readers. Although we appreciated every individual’s time and effort to comment, we felt that collectively the suggestions that were made over and over again were the suggestions that we really wanted to focus on.

Here are the top 5 changes that were suggested and what we did to correct them:

1. More gripping content presentation - Many ProBlogger readers felt that our main page displayed post excerpts that were too short and lacked visual interest.
    
   We improved this by implementing the “More” tag, which in Wordpress is a feature that is built into the blog software. We had been using a tag that simply displayed the first 300 characters of the post, regardless if it was mid sentence or not. This tended to make the excerpt less appealing and didn’t encourage readers to click-through to read the rest fot he post.
    
   To improve the visual aspect of the posts, we started exploring the Creative Commons which allows for the right to use other people’s images in your blog posts. We decided to sign up with Flickr and search for images with Creative Common rights that fit our business model. Now we have access to an extensive library of images that we can use to enhance the visual interest of our blog posts.
2. More visual interest - Many readers also felt that our color scheme and lack of visual components created a dull, “clinical” feel which didn’t excite the eyes of first time visitors.
    
   A dull and clinical image is not exactly the impression we wanted to give our readers, especially for blog about marketing. I made several improvements including changing the background color to a darker shade to draw the eye to the whitespace, added color to the author box, increased the size of the post title text, adding images to the post excerps and several other small changes. All these changes brought the design to life and added a visual interest that was definately lacking before.
3. More professional footer - A number of readers commented on the tags that we had listed just below the footer on the main page. Many of these tags linked to gaming and poker sites that obviously had nothing to do with the content of our site.
    
   I knew this was going to be an issue before it started. We removed those tags and solved that issue. Long story short, we had an obligation to post those tags due to a paid link business model that we have since abandoned.
4. Emphasizing key points in posts - A few readers commented that the longer posts needed more bullet points and the break up of text to help those who “scan” and to increase readability.
    
   Another good point and although the Wordpress editor doesn’t allow for much formatting of the text, we are much more aware of using bullets, bolding key points and keeping paragraphs short. We also went back and edited a few of our longer posts to improve their readability.
5. Improving the header - some of the readers thought the header wasn’t eye catching enough and that the tagline was too long.
    
   Made several changes to the header to help correct this. Started by shortening the tagline and changing the font-type and color to give it more interest without being too loud. Also moved the subscribe links to the top right of every page making it easier for readers to locate. Other changes included making the navigation bar taller and adding a slight visual shade to soften the color and add visual interest.

In summary, both Brandi and I agreed that the consultation provided some great insight and prompted changes that definately increased the quality of this blog. I hope that by posting our experience, you can take something away that can help you improve your blog or website. If you’d like to see the ‘before’ and ‘after’ screen captures of our website, click on the links below.

• Marketme.com BEFORE ProBlogger review
• Marketme.com AFTER ProBlogger review

Reader Comments

Chris says...February 29th, 2008

It’s one thing to get the advise of the experts at ProBlogger… it’s quite another to publish the results.

Well done!

The advice you received will definitely help the rest of us. Thanks!

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