Website Impressions

[Ed Healy]

I'm looking for honest feedback on the following three sites:
* Kobold Quarterly
* Jonathan Drain's d20 Source
* Dungeon Mastering

I'd like to know three things:

(1) You opinion of the site content. Content is king, and is really what draws people back to a site on a regular basis.

(2) Your opinion of the site design. Site design won't really help traffic, without good content. It can hurt it, though. Any suggestions?

(3) I need suggestions on how to increase traffic on these sites.

Any help would be appreciated.

[DudeMonkey]

I'll look over the content when I have more time, but here are some thoughts about the overall usability of the sites.

I would lose the banner ads. They never generate as much revenue as you think they will and, if your site is effectively an online store, you don't want to be polluting your brand name with ads for other brands. Also, those particular beholder banners are distracting especially when they do the seizure-flashing.

Kolbold Quarterly ... you probably want to get your top navigation down underneath the header image. Better yet, put it on the left navigation. Having multiple navigation schemas is confusing and it's too easy to lose the "good" content (messageboards and stores) in this case. I almost didn't notice them. The clean, large font design is going to appeal more to men than women. Given the target demographic, I imagine this won't be a problem. The author names link back to the home page. You probably don't want that.

d20 source ... decide whether you want a blog or a website. At first impression, it looks like a blog (and it is a blog), but the "Navigation" section along the right makes it look like there's content that's not attached to the blog. By the way, you can get away with right navigation on blogs for some reason. I don't know why that is. The banner ads are especially distracting on this page and tend to draw focus away from the content.

DungeonMastering ... the mouseover navigation along the top is surprising. I don't expect to get such an abrupt color change when I point the mouse cursor at one of these.

Generating traffic ... the blogs should do okay. You have constantly updating traffict (right?). You might want to add a module that lists "recent posts" which allows user content to affect the home page. Always a good thing for traffic. The big thing with blogs is incoming links. You need to have people link to your blog, preferably with a text link and not an image banner. The Kobold Quarterly site could probably use better placement of the "forums" link. That's where, I imagine, you're going to get your freshest content and that's where you want to drive traffic if you're trying to build a solid community store/site.

Content is definitely king. I'll look over it later.

[Khezial Tahr]

Definitely loose that beholder ad.

[Ed Healy]

Thanks for the feedback.

Keep it coming!

[DudeMonkey]

What's your overall goal here? Are you merely trying to increase traffic or are you trying to convert some of those site visitors into customers? Are you trying to build a community for community's sake?

Give me a basic idea of where you're going with these sites. If you don't want to influence other people's feedback, let me know and I'll email you.

[Cpt_kirstov]

DudeMonkey wrote:

Kolbold Quarterly ... you probably want to get your top navigation down underneath the header image. Better yet, put it on the left navigation. Having multiple navigation schemas is confusing and it's too easy to lose the "good" content (messageboards and stores) in this case. I almost didn't notice them.

I definitely agree here, through the multiple navigation spots you are assuming 1 of 2 things of your customers:

1) That they know how to use 'Home' and 'End' to find the top/bottom of the page.
2) That they won't get frustrated going from the bottom to the top of the page to the top to navigate if they don't know how to use 'Home' and 'End'

[Elendur]

Ah, the free wotc adventures sorted by level, nice!

[Ed Healy]

DudeMonkey wrote:

What's your overall goal here? Are you merely trying to increase traffic or are you trying to convert some of those site visitors into customers? Are you trying to build a community for community's sake?

Give me a basic idea of where you're going with these sites. If you don't want to influence other people's feedback, let me know and I'll email you.

I'd rather not taint the other feedback. Email me at ephealy (at) ephealy (dot) com?

[Trey]

DudeMonkey wrote:

I would lose the banner ads. They never generate as much revenue as you think they will and, if your site is effectively an online store, you don't want to be polluting your brand name with ads for other brands. Also, those particular beholder banners are distracting especially when they do the seizure-flashing.

Also, on the Kobold site, freeing up the column used on the right side for the ad, or even moving the ad down on the page, could provide some flexibility for your own content. I think your look is nice, but just as a personal preference, I would love to see the style for the store and the boards unified with the rest of the Kobold pages a bit more. I do like a site with a solid design through and through. Obviously, form has to follow function in some cases, but always keeping an eye on visual continuity helps a bit, I think.

And as DudeMonkey suggests, if you do have ads, I think your readers would really prefer static ones.

[DudeMonkey]

Ed Healy wrote:

I'd rather not taint the other feedback.

I sent you an email. If you don't get it (my mail servers are hosted with Verio, a provider who is constantly getting themselves blacklisted), post back here and I'll send it from another email address that might not be blocked.

[tdewitt274]

Honestly, not a fan of blogs. There is too much content on one page. I'd suggest keeping the "top 5" entries. After so much reading on a monitor, I get tired of it. I need something to keep me going. This is usually a link to "Previous Posts".

Another thing that may help with the Blog issue that I seem to have would be "teasers." Have a list of the top 10 and only the first part of the post (500 characters or so) and then link off with a "more". This is assuming that you have control over such things.
This also helps in site navigation, as stated before, I don't have to scroll too far to find the site links.

In either case make sure that you keep the "Reply to Post" links if possible.

The d20 site's scroll length isn't so bad for me, mostly because I'm working off a 40" monitor and my resolution's a little higher. However, it doesn't "resize" well. The other sites have a minimum width (due to images or styling, too lazy to look), this one can be "scrunched" to a letter wide. Normally, this is fine, but it's not so good when your sidebars are wider than your content.

The links, as mentioned already, for KQ are "outside" of the box. As if they aren't supposed to be there. Consider adding them to the "Articles, Editorials, Press" area (above, with a HR tag to separate them).

The ad mid page on DM is detracting from the content. There's stuff there, but I think that it's an ad when I look over it quickly. I did go over some of the content here, but it was awhile back. I wasn't impressed by the articles I did read (World Building and Campaign Design) as there was no "crunch" to it. Theory can only go so far.

That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

[Khezial Tahr]

Flipped through all three sites. the Jon Drain and the Dungeonmastering sites seem to have some decent content. Some good ideas and great resources. The quarterly looks interesting, but there are no teasers or non published bits to entice non-subscribers.