Watermark: Simplicity Blog Review & Renovations

Yes, I know -- things keep changing around here, and I keep talking about how things keep changing around here. I've not even addressed the Watermark reviews at The Weblog Review. I'll talk about those later, but today -- Skellie; her blog is my best find since I came back online.

Skellie did a Simplicity Review of Watermark, and I've implemented many of her suggestions. She has given permission to post her email, which I've done below the cut so those of you who are getting bored with all this can ignore it.

You might be sorry to miss it, though -- at least this, her summary paragraph:

A good overall principle is to understand that your visitors, collectively, have only a certain amount of attention. The less you have to distract them, the more attention the items you do have will get. I'd always suggest emphasizing what is most important to you, because it will help your visitors to do the same.

Also, I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have about what has, and hasn't, been changed. More specifically:

Hi SB,

Now that I've finally torn myself away from your writing I should probably start on the review!

Excellent beginning!

Here are some suggestions for increasing the simplicity of your site and reducing the clutter.

1. Remove the table borders. At the moment they drag at the eye slightly, interrupting the whitespace around your words. If you want to contrast the sidebar with the content column you could add a very faint gray background to it.

I tried this, and hated it -- but it inspired me to try softening the borders, which I really like.

2. Equal spacing between items. Items on the sidebar seem to be spaced at times widely apart and at times quite close. I think one paragraph between separate items would lend the sidebar a greater sense of logic.

I think this is better now.

3. Add a smaller form for email subscriptions. At the moment the form is disappearing into the side of the sidebar, and the effect is a little jarring.

I tried to make this smaller, without luck; tried installing it differently -- no change; and further examination tells me that this is a deliberate element of the FeedBlitz design. So I'm living with it for the moment.

4. Label your additional sites. At the moment the links are beneath your RSS feed button without explanation. I think adding the heading 'My other sites' or something similar would make readers more willing to interact with them.

Um. Gosh. Why didn't I think of that?

5. . . .

6. Remove 'Email me', add a Contact page. You could put a link to the page above 'About SBPoet'. You could put other forms of contact on the page; for example, you could move your Meebo widget there, and so on.

I should note here that Skellie had previously advised me to consolidate my categories and move them to pages, with a list on the main page -- which I did. And I followed this advice, as well. The 'pages' option is fairly new at TypePad, and what a nice one it is.

I'm sure Skellie did not anticipate that such a feature would allow me to keep my widgets and images by just spreading them around, and un-minimalistically ornamenting the pages.

Let me just mention here, all errors of judgement are my own.

7. Remove unnecessary widgets. Even from the perspective of a personal site, readers will not tackle a sidebar that is too full of stuff. Here are some things I think you should consider removing: Translate (auto translators don't produce meaningful text), no. people online, Recent Comments (doesn't provide any information about what was said, or who the people are), Recent Posts (readers prefer to scroll down than interact with these), Twitter updates (I think it'd be better to simply link to your Twitter profile from your contact page), MyBlogLog widgets (the images are, on average, about 5kb each. You have about 30 images. 30kb x 5 is a 150kb widget!...) . . .

About the widgets from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog -- those show my readers' avatars, and I thought they linked to their sites -- but they don't. They link to their profiles at the blog networks.

So that gives me pause, and I'm still thinking about it. I like seeing those friendly faces on my sidebar. I did cut them down by half, though.

The romlet widget does link back to the referring site -- and, when I put in a request for a feature to not include search engines, I got an email back with revised code to do just that! Yay for customer service at romlet!

So maybe the blog network widgets will go, and the romlet will stay.