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aneeta
Posts: 16
Joined: 10/9/2004
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feedback on my site please - 5/31/2005 23:19:54
Hello,
A few months ago I requested a critique on my site and the common comment was that the home page was just too long.
I have taken this point on board and revamped my site - here's the url
http://www.howtotellagreatstory.com
I would really like your help again please. I cannot decide what's important and what's not. So please, I need some solid input. I would appreciate it if you could answer some of the following questions:
1. When you first arrived at the site, was the subject clear?
2. Is the webpage still too long - if so, what parts in particular do you think is unnecessary and would detract from the main idea of the site.
3. Is this site user-friendly?
Any recommendations on improving this site any further would be most appreciated.
Thank you very much in advance. Please contact me directly at editor@howtotellagreatstory.com
Aneeta
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Starhugger
Posts: 538
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RE: feedback on my site please - 6/1/2005 1:34:31
Hi Aneeta. I'll just give my impressions here in the list.
For starters, I seriously think you should lose the popup. It's huge, in-yer-face, premature and presumptuous. It asks me to commit to a continuing relationship with your site, by subscribing to your newsletter, even before I have had a chance to see the site. It almost drove me away, flat out, and I went there only to review the site. If I happened on it through a search, I would leave, period. I have that reaction when I see small popups too, but yours is extremely intrusive. Sorry, I'm just being honest. You have a subscribe area farther down in a much more appropriate point in the presentation, I think, so you don't really need the popup anyway.
Second, my gut reaction to the top of the page is that it is inconsistent in the tone that it gives. The banner with the logo and graphic is really nice and gives a genteel, refined, magical feel, but the big bold text with the red highlighting and italics and such, is more like a hard-sell sales sight. My reaction is to be confused and a bit defensive about what to expect from the site. And after the gentle, "lovely" banner, the huge font size with just about every text emphasis style available being used (italics, bold, colour, etc.) just seems to yell at me. I feel put off as I read down the page for the same reason. I would suggest you stick to the refined, tasteful, gentle, artful tone that you start with, which seems to me much more representative of storytelling than what looks like a sales letter hard-sell page.
Along the same line, I found the graphic of the book also confusing because I can't see the "cover" clearly. It's at such an angle that it seems to want to give me the message that "it's a book" more than it wants to show me the visual cover. You've got a beautiful graphic there; I think you should use it more clearly and not hide it behind tricks with perspective.
Because of the inconsistencies of style and tone, it left me with the sense that you weren't following your own advice in composing your site. You give the example of two different sales pitches, one that has a direct, almost pushy approach and promises guarantees, and another that seems to gently establish rapport first and allow the natural flow to do much of the work so that the product almost sells itself. And yet, with all the highlighting, bold, etc., your site strikes me as taking the first approach, not the second. I *know* you're trying to sell me something and my instinct is to put up a boundary, like the customer in your example.
I would suggest you use your own product to sell itself using its own approach more. I think you are trying to do that, but my impression is that you're trying to stuff the round peg of your product into the square hole of a methodology. Instead, create a page/site that appeals to an audience who is looking to be intrigued, fascinated and taken on a journey about storytelling. I would think that's the kind of viewers you're likely to get anyway, right? I'm left with the sense that you're trying to use "a methodology" to create the site, but you already have a sense of what you want to do and what you want it to be like. But that doesn't really match the "methodology," so you've wound up trying to mix oil and water. I say this because that banner conveys a very clear tone and seems to be well thought out about the tone it's trying to convey, and your content speaks of a process of establishing rapport, but the site doesn't seem to "practice what it preaches."
If that's the case (that you already have an instinct about what you want to do), then I say go with your instincts more and only use the methodology sparingly and as a secondary consideration. I think if you spin a story that creates rapport with your audience, the length of the page won't be as critical because people will WANT to read more. As it is, I see a lot of point form, which doesn't tell a story as much as it shoves facts in my face to get a result (my purchase).
I think you have a challenge because you're trying to use a left-brain kind of approach (factual, logical, task-oriented) to present and sell a right-brain kind of product (intuitive, creative, process-oriented). I think you'd have a much better site if you used a more right-brain way of presenting your case to the reader, even if it has a left-brain sub-structure beneath it to steer the reader toward a sale. And I may be wrong, but I suspect you'd have more success with the site that way too.
I hope that helps. I didn't follow your structure of questions much, but that's my honest impression of the site, just from checking out the cover page. Good luck with it!
Starhugger
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aneeta
Posts: 16
Joined: 10/9/2004
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RE: feedback on my site please - 6/1/2005 8:43:52
Hi Starhugger,
Thank you so much for all this input.
I really appreciate the time taken to type it all out.
It has really helped. I was kinda lost and I get what you're saying. I'll work on it.
Regards,
Aneeta
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aneeta
Posts: 16
Joined: 10/9/2004
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RE: feedback on my site please - 6/1/2005 9:45:35
Hi Starhugger,
I really hope that you get this message. I really thank you so much for taking the trouble to state it all. Anyway, I took all you said save one and rewrote the page. I even used your own words.
" beautiful, genteel, refined and magical skills"
The only thing I could not do is change the perpective of the cover of the ebook. I will have to somehow figure it out. I outsourced this part and will think on it. Right now, the most important is the content. The reasons for hit bold and highlighting words were because of SEO requirements. But really, I agree with your suggestion even more.
I would love to know what you think now ... as always, please be honest. Your honesty was much appreciated.
I await your reply.
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Starhugger
Posts: 538
Joined: 4/12/2005
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RE: feedback on my site please - 6/1/2005 11:10:28
Hi Aneeta,
Wow, you really did change it! I think it's much better, although I wonder if you may have swung a bit too far the other way.  You have taken out almost all of the emphasis on certain phrases that would stand out and (hopefully) attract more interest at a glance. I wonder about using other colours to do that. It doesn't have to be a bold red; there are many other web-safe colours out there that would also stand out. Non-bolded red can draw attention without screaming, and blue works well too, or a blue bold. Or you could use a bold maroon, or a nice bold green, or even a purple, or an autumn orange. or a khaki green which can have a goldish or bronzy look to it. Anyway, you get the idea.  You might even decide on 2 or 3 different kinds or categories of phrases you want to highlight (e.g., emphasis in the story vs emphasis for sales purposes) and use different colours for each. Just an idea off the top of my head.
I like the fancy script font at the top for the heading; much more in keeping with the tone of your content and product, I think. Be careful about what fonts you use though, because if the person doesn't have that font installed, then it will default to something else and you don't always have control over that. Here is a good site I found that tells you which fonts are commonly found on different operating systems. Using these fonts maximises your chance of being able to control what your page is going to look like on someone else's computer. And I would also suggest you use the "font-family" CSS designation in your code, since that allows you to specify alternatives to your first choice of font.
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/res_fontsamp.htm
I'm flattered that you used my adjectives! LOL (I'll e-you offlist so you know where to send the royalties...  Kidding!) Seriously, I wonder if some other words might be a little more SEO-focused, so you might want to be sure to check out commonly used search words, if you haven't already. Oh--and you said the text styles before were for SEO purposes? I might be wrong but I didn't think search engines paid attention to font styles, only the words and phrases in the text (and sometimes meta-tags). Or maybe you know something I don't...? (wouldn't be the first time... I'm still learning this stuff.)
I like the approach of telling a story about story-telling. I really hope it works for you because I would hate to have steered you wrong! I can only go by my own instincts in my feedback, but you can change your approach around from time to time, to test out how effective each one is. One word of caution about using the story-telling approach: tread carefully around that fine line between "cute" and condescending. There were a couple of places that almost seemed to stray a bit close to that line, but didn't necessarily go over it. But that might just be my over-sensitive radar system. You will know your target audience better than I do, so you can tell better where that line is for your readers.
Having the subscribe box at the top seems like a good compromise from having the popup, since it gets the message across right away that you have a newsletter (which was probably the point of having the popup greet new visitors, right?). I'm assuming the popup is gone, since I didn't see it this time, but maybe it drops a cookie so that it only comes up once?
I hope you can get a new book graphic from your outsource. I think it would work better. I think most of these guys offer different options for that kind of thing.
One minor technical suggestion: put some cell padding in your text tables so that there's some space between the border and the text.
Good luck with it! Let us know how you make out. 
Starhugger
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aneeta
Posts: 16
Joined: 10/9/2004
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RE: feedback on my site please - 6/1/2005 21:19:33
Hi Starhugger,
Thank you once again for the detailed feedback.
I have added some colour to the webpage again.
There was only one thing I needed to clarify - you said this:
One word of caution about using the story-telling approach: tread carefully around that fine line between "cute" and condescending. There were a couple of places that almost seemed to stray a bit close to that line, but didn't necessarily go over it. "
I have gone over the text and removed some of what I consider "cute". But really, what I consider cute and what others don't may differ significantly. So please, if you could just point this out, I'd be grateful. Just point to the paragraph and line would do.
Also, I did remove the pop-up. It's actually a hoverad. I will probably add it later but instead of the 'in-yer-face' text, I will make it more in line with the content. I will also delay it for about a minute. That's later on though.
Also, I added that cell padding part.
I think I was so receptive to what you said because I had wanted to use this startegy of telling a story myself but everyone else seemed to like the salescopy approach. They liked it but that did not mean they bought it! Let's see how this one goes ...
Thanks a lot.
With grateful thanks,
Aneeta
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Starhugger
Posts: 538
Joined: 4/12/2005
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RE: feedback on my site please - 6/2/2005 19:26:06
quote:
I have gone over the text and removed some of what I consider "cute". But really, what I consider cute and what others don't may differ significantly. So please, if you could just point this out, I'd be grateful. Just point to the paragraph and line would do.
As I said, it wasn't enough to actually go over the line and it was just a sense I got that it might be heading in that direction in a few places. Not enough for me to be able to say "there it is." Just use your best judgement. It was mostly a "word to the wise."
I'm sorry to see you took the fancy script off the title. I thought it looked nice. But it's up to you. The word highlighting "looks" better but you've just highlighted the same phrases throughout, which I think loses impact after a few times rather than gains it. I would suggest picking and choosing a word here and a phrase there that you want to stand out. The rule of thumb I think is most effective, from a viewer's standpoint, is that if I am only going to skim your page or the first third of it, what do you want to jump out to me and stick with me? I sometimes will see a site that I don't have time or inclination to look at in the moment, but it sticks with me and I go back and find it later. It's often because something they've written has stuck with me and I think, "Hmmm, that sounded interesting, I'd like to go back and find out more."
quote:
Also, I did remove the pop-up. It's actually a hoverad. I will probably add it later but instead of the 'in-yer-face' text, I will make it more in line with the content. I will also delay it for about a minute. That's later on though.
It's up to you, but be aware that a lot of people really hate moving banners, popups, hovercraft or whatever else you want to call them. I call them a pain in the...well, you see what I mean. When I see one of those things, I leave. Period. Even if the site has something I want, I leave. And I've seen others express a similar sentiment on various message boards. Something to consider.
Good luck with the site!
Starhugger
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aneeta
Posts: 16
Joined: 10/9/2004
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RE: feedback on my site please - 6/2/2005 19:48:31
Hi Starhugger,
Will take it all in. Thank you so much for taking the time out to read and critique the site.
FYI, I only removed the fancy writing because is wasn't what was on the list you gave in the wonderful link.
Will think about this too.
Thanks once again.
Regards
Aneeta
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