The Marketing Technology Blog

When I decided to change my website layout, I sought out feedback from many of my friends. Being a Product Manager for a software firm brings some additional attention to the mix. My buddies at work were very critical (and I’m thankful for their interest). I was really impressed with the feedback. Some of it came through the Relaunch posting here on the blog. Here’s some info and what I did with it:

The Bad

• The image of me smiling like I ‘owned’ the world was really popular with my readers and friends. Who knew?! So I put the picture back up and matched it to the theme as best I could (you can see it below the fold on the main page).
• Usability was a biggy! People really were disturbed that they couldn’t click on the title of the blog to go back to the home page. I fixed that by making the entire div clickable:

  <div id="blogtitle" onclick="location.href=’http://marketingtechblog.com’;" style="cursor: pointer;">

• Folks didn’t like multiple posts on the front page. Along with the ‘nifty box’ on the right hand side, it confused them because they didn’t see a relationship between the box and the post (there is still an opportunity for me to unite those graphically).
• The list of previous posts had the number of words in the post. I received a LOT of feedback that knowing the number of words in the post was inconsequential, but if I posted the number of comments, that would more likely generate interest in the post. Wow! Social networking at it’s best. So I modified the Previous Post widget to show the number of comments rather than the number of posts:

  echo ‘</a>’;
  /*$words = get_the_content(”, 0, ”);
  if ($words) {
  $post = strip_tags($words);
  $post = explode(’ ‘, $post);
  $totalcount = count($post);
  } else {
  $totalcount=0;
  }*/
  echo ‘<div class="showwords"> (’;
  comments_number(’No Comments’, ‘1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’);
  echo ‘)</div>’;

• Search should be at the top of the page. I’m still working on that.
• They thought they could stretch the site too wide or too thin since I made the layout flexible with the width of the browser. As a result, I put a ‘cap’ on the width for both minimum and maximum.

  #main {
  width:85%;
  max-width: 1050px;
  min-width: 750px;
  }

The Good

• My development buddies that use the web really enjoy the ‘tag cloud’. The tag cloud shows, by color and size, what I write about the most on my blog. I like tag clouds because they keep me focusing on the topics my blog should be talking about… business, marketing, and technology.
• They like the colors… the red scared them a little, but they thought the theme was professional and worked with the ‘fiery’ colors. That’s what I was really going for. Blue is a trustworthy color, I wanted to be edgy.
• They like the content. In the end, I suppose this is what matters most!
• They love the roomy layout on the single post pages. My sidebar was busy and took up a lot of real estate before.

Content is king, but usability is VERY important! I suppose the great news was that there were no comments about The Ugly.