Next up in our EntreCard site review series is a blog called Jesus Encounter, written by 19 year old Jeremy Newton.

Now, in all fairness, Jeremy states on his blog that he recently updated the design of his site (since purchasing the review with EC credits) so I’m not sure what the original site looked like. I’m going by today’s view.

On first glance, it was quite obvious to me that the design for the site was a free, unaltered theme. Now, I’m not here to bash free themes by any means. But I can’t stress enough that if you want your website or blog to stand apart from the crowd, you need to at the VERY LEAST do some customizations to it to make it your own. Again, since Jeremy recently installed this new theme, he has said that he’s going to do some custom work to it. I sure hope he does that!

• I do love the tabbed sections in the sidebar. I use them here on this site, and I really like the way they keep things organized and listed out without taking up too much space or creating a long sidebar. I especially hate when the sidebar goes for “pages” below the main content… major pet peeve! Fortunately, that doesn’t happen too often with this blog, though I wish the background was solid for the whole thing to “even out” the bottoms of the three columns (that they went all the way to the footer in a way). The archives pages, for example, could stand to show more than 2 posts/excerpts per page.
• The color seems a little bland to me. Grey. Washed out. Dull. Now, I know that this happens to be a spiritual blog, but isn’t spirituality about filling our souls with light and love? Finding our happiness through our faith? I don’t feel happy when I see this site, the lack of color seriously weighs me down.
• There are less than 100 “pages” listed in Yahoo and Google - and only 7 listed in MSN. All this tells me right now is that the site is fairly new, and needs that daily attention to get more picked up. Time and more writing will get it more attention.
• One thing that’s very easy to take note of is Jeremy’s passion in his writing. His style isn’t “preachy” nor is it frightening in any way. He’s writing from his heart, and it’s quite obvious. That’s such a good, refreshing thing to see, as sometimes I think especially newer blogs try to conform to some “attitude” they think they’re supposed to have. This isn’t true whatsoever. Of course, in return, you’re going to find that your audience is full of a combination of people who “get it” and people who simply don’t. A blogger can’t let this be discouraging, or altering. I’m very pleased that he’s decided to be honest and write in his own voice.

In all honesty, aside from the colorless design, and a few tweaks to the layout, there’s not much I’d have to say that’s “bad” or unappealing about this site. I do question the ad blocks a little, because they’re really NOT related, and it’s very very difficult to monetize a religious website. I mean, it’s honestly near impossible to make any money this way. My suggestion would be for Jeremy to come up with some sort of tool people can use to work on their own spirituality. Be it a spreadsheet or a journal page, or something like that. If it’s small, give it away. If it’s really concise and detailed, charge a few bucks for a download (like an ebook). Otherwise, you’re just not going to get ads that are targeted to your readers, which means you’re less likely to get your readers clicking on them, so they’re a waste of space. Just be careful, because you’re also giving high importance to something unrelated to your blog, so you might find yourself penalized in Google for something like that if you’re not cautious enough about who you allow to advertise (or who you choose to promote).

My first “buyer” is The Ace Report.

• Upon first loading of the site, I noticed that it’s got a pretty heavy image-based design (rounded corners, the date box on posts) but still loads fairly swiftly. At the least, it loads in good order, so the important stuff shows up first (like content!) and that’s a definite plus. The site is VERY blue… lots of blue everywhere.



• Speaking of that date box - it’s pretty un-necessary, given that the date of the post is already in text under the title of each post. While I realize it’s “pretty”, it’s something that most readers don’t need to know, especially not twice. I’m not suggesting that dates on posts aren’t necessary, but rather reducing the image files needed could reduce page load times and get a little more blue-ness off the site.
• The “meta” area under the post titles is pretty large. I’d suggest moving it to the bottom of each post (or at least moving the category and tag lists down there). What you’re doing at this point is giving people too much to read that’s not your main content. I also feel you’re possibly using too many categories for each post. There’s no need to categorize with “NFL” and “NFL Players” and “NFL Contract Issues“. It looks a little search-engine-spammy this way, and also can confuse readers looking to read about the NFL in general. Do they click on “NFL”? What will they miss by clicking on “NFL Players” and not “NFL”? That kind of thing.
• The fact that there are photos in nearly every post is great, and the fact that credit is being given makes me smile. But realize that just because you give credit, that doesn’t mean using the image is okay, especially when it comes to using photos from flickr and they happen to be photos of sports celebrities. It’s unlikely that the people posting the photos in their flickr stream have full use rights (as it’s unlikely they’re all professional celebrity photographers or all media photographers) and you could be getting yourself into trouble. Claiming “ignorance” to usage rights won’t hold up legally either. It’s best to source photos yourself, either by contacting the player’s agency or publicist and requesting media kits, or by using stock photos with full credit if required by the copyright holder.
• I realize that the site is fairly new, but the Blogroll bothers me a little on this site. It’s a WordPress site, which by default gives a WordPress based Blogroll. However this isn’t meant to be permanent, and the folks at WordPress fully expect you to remove those links and put more relevant, related ones in your Blogroll. I’m pretty sure that sports-minded readers aren’t going to much care about the WordPress Development Blog, rather they might be interested in other sports-related sites that the owner of the blog reads himself.
• Let’s talk monetization and ads. There are about as many AdSense ads on this site as allowed by Google, short a video or product referral link type. We’re seeing a 460×68 ad at the top of the first three posts on the home page, the link-type ads (long bar of text links), a widget first thing on the sidebar to sell products via WidgetBucks, a donation button… even in a section that’s titled “Help Us Out”. This makes it seem that the site owner is desperate for money, and trying to make sure that anyone and everyone who comes to the site is forced to see all the ways they can help him make that money before he provides them with useful, interesting content. The truth of the matter is that when you bombard your readers with ads like this, they do one of two things: They become blinded by them and decide your site isn’t worth staying on and they leave, or they become blinded by them and don’t bother clicking on any of them because they’re so busy searching for the content. While I realize that everyone’s got the goal of making money off their blogs, the best way to do it is to be subtle. Don’t “ask” for help, and don’t have it so that at any scroll-point on the page, there is more than one call for money. Why put the WidgetBucks code at the very top of your sidebar, when things like recent posts (which is currently in the… footer?), categories and RSS subscription buttons would help your readers out, which would in turn help your reader count, which would in turn make you more money? That said, I’ve never liked general donation buttons. No one “needs” you to write your blog, so why ask for a donation for doing it? Sure, if you wrote WordPress plugins, fulfilling a genuine need, or were saving up for some (genuine) cause, then yes, by all means ask for donations. But just for having a blog and writing on it? Nah. Not worth a donation.
• One of my biggest pet peeves? A default About page. “This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from.” That means, edit the page to put information about yourself or your site on it. Like the default Blogroll, it’s there as a placeholder, and needs changing. Give readers a photo of you so they can associate a face with a blog. Give people a way to pitch stories to you, either by email or contact form. Tell your readers who you are, why you’re writing the blog, what your goals are (as long as they’re not purely monetization related - because if they are, give up now).

All in all, I know the site’s new, and I know that there’s a lot of learning curve that needs to be met when you’re starting with a new site. Test things, see how they’re going for you, and if it’s not blowing you away, change it. But the bottom line is not to bombard your new audience with ads or beggings for money, start by putting the majority of your energy in writing good content, utilizing social media networks, and get yourself known, but only after cleaning up a little.

The reason for doing these “free” reviews is to help illustrate to my readers and potential clients what my design style and opinions are about various random websites on the internet. It’s not meant to belittle any other designers, but rather explain what I’d have done differently and why.

These are by no means going to be done in complete detail, as would be done with full website evaluations that we charge for. I’m not going to get into fixing code (though I’ll likely announce if it’s done incorrectly) or giving suggestions for SEO or marketing. This is just an objective, unsolicited design/functionality review. I’ll likely just do a search for some random topic and pick the first “ugly” website I can find, and go on a roll from there.

That said, let’s get started. Our first search was for the term “gift baskets”. Looking on page 10, I found Baskets of Faith, a Christian gift basket store.

A quick peek at the site and source code (HTML) tells me that this site is likely an OSCommerce store, and it’s definitely hosted by NetworkSolutions and is built with some kind of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. The initial problems I see with this is that the site’s almost entirely done in javascript and poorly written code. I’ve taken a sample:

That, my folks, is poorly written code. Let me explain:

There are (way way way too many) instances of “font” tags that shouldn’t be in there - all colors, styles, and fonts should be managed by CSS classes, once, in the CSS file.

There is one website link that’s been split in half and linked to twice. “Ameri” and “casChristian.com”. The worst part is that the font tags all had to be repeated twice too. They’ve also styled and colored their spaces, which is just fanTAStic, isn’t it? In fact, I just colored in all the individual spaces in this sentence, and they’re all bright fuschia! Don’t you LOVE them!? Okay, so I didn’t do that, because I don’t want to waste page load time with stupid extra code like that, but I had you fooled for a second, didn’t I? Onward…

While looking at the code, let’s take a peek at that color of the font they’re using on a light grey background “#808080″.
It’s 50% grey, which in a block, looks something like this:

Not horrible in a block of color on a white background, right? Let’s take a look at it in some text, as taken from a clip on the site:

If I was the kind of person who thought that everyone in the world who did stuff like this was trying to game the search engines, I’d say that these people were trying to game the search engines. They don’t REALLY care if you click on any of those massive amounts of links in their footer… they want Google to see them. But they don’t want to get in trouble for hiding links, so they made them a different shade of grey. What little Stinky McStinkersons they are!

That said, they appear to have many many Christian themed online shops. Something else I think might be a bad idea. Not for any other reason than they’re likely built on the same account, hosted on same or similar servers, built the same way, and are technically fighting against each other for important keywords that they want to be found for.

They’ve likely done this sort of footer linking to all their sites FROM all their sites, and well as you might figure, Google hates that kind of thing too.

On to the rest of the design…

Sidebar links are not only different colors, but different sizes (often too small), full of too many keywords (which is equivalent to spamming the search engines), and are misaligned.

In fact, the whole site is out of alignment. Some stuff is justified, some left-aligned, some centered… it’s an alignment mess that my mechanic would charge me $65/hour to fix if my car were that screwed up. Some of the text even goes over designed-in boundary lines.

They’re also linking out to all their other stores here, trying to be “tricky” about it by embedding those links inside long lists of other links to different categories in their store.

Bottom line here? OSCommerce stores can be great, but they’re not too well designed. WYSIWYG editors are a clean coder’s nightmare. Designing in varying shades of all one color (in this case, grey, white, black) is absolutely boring and will definitely lead to “blindness”, meaning that people will get so tired of having to squint and search long, keyword filled lists for what they want that they’re leave.

This site needs to be cleaned up code-wise and color/design wise, organized, restructured, and marketed properly (as do all their other sites) in order to get them higher than page 10 in Google’s SERPs for “gift baskets”.

What are your thoughts on that site?