Mike Olbinski - A Mike Life
- December 29th, 2007
- COMMENTS 5
What
Who
Mike
Mike has been involved in the online community for some time now. He is into website building and online communities. Mike currently runs the sports-dedicated site ArizonaSportsFans.com which has been receiving over 1 million page views monthly. Mike has turned Arizona Sports Fans into the number one sports forum in Arizona. Mike also runs his own blog, AMikeLife.com. A Mike Life is dedicated to bringing you the latest updates in the world of music, T.V., movies, books, and even a little bit of technology.
My Opinions
Today I am going to focus solely on the design of A Mike Life, not the content.
When I first got to AMikeLife.com the first thing I saw was red and black. Now, like I have said before, I am not a color expert, but it seems to me that a red and black layout is an extremely poor color scheme. It’s all personal preference here Mike, but I would recommend changing the red to a blue or an orange of some sort. Come to think of it, just about any color other than red would work.
The next thing I saw was Mike’s neat logo - a microphone with a person’s head as the top serving as the “I” in “Mike.” Pretty creative and clever. Good job here, but again, the red doesn’t work with the black background.
As I continued down the page, I saw something I really liked - my name. Or, “Elite By Design” anyways. This is a really cool way to encourage me to keep visiting back and to subscribe to your feed. I don’t know if this is built into your theme or if it is a plugin you are using, but it works well with your site. However, like I said in my article about RSS positioning, you need to have a prominent RSS icon and have it strategically positioned to maximize your results. On your site, all you have on your front page is a dinky little icon. Barely noticeable and definitely not eye catching. I would recommend making either A) a larger, more noticeable icon or B) try to position it somewhere so that it is not surrounded by other content that chokes it out.
Your “Featured News” section is perfect Mike (aside from the red!). It is clearly a new, or featured as you call it, article that grabs my attention. I love how you have icons to go with the category, date, and name of the person who wrote the article. They aren’t necessarily really important but it makes everything look a little more professional. I love how you have just a brief description of the story with a “read full story” link that is easy to see. It is also nice to have the comments link displayed where it can be easily found. I really like how the picture fits so perfectly in line with everything else. I don’t know if that is coincidence or you plan the size of the pictures you use, but the images look really great and eye catching. I wouldn’t change to much here Mike, good job.
Next, your tabbed section. I like this section on your blog. I think that as always, tabs are a great way to unclutter any sidebar. It works on your site and I wouldn’t change much about this either. It is easy to navigate and the different links are clearly defined and identified.
Ok the next thing I saw on your blog was your advertisements. I’m not really a fan of 125×125 ads, but they are so standard there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it. At least you put them in a non-obtrusive spot where it doesn’t interfere with content.
Below your featured article area I also noticed your adsense spot. Now everyone knows I’m opposed to adsense, but I’m not going to criticize you for using it. You have chosen a good location for it. For me, I don’t really notice it because I’m going Ad-Blind (call the doctor!) but I’m sure that it attracts a lot of regular readers’ eyes. Let me know how you’re doing with that adsense spot.
Next up I saw your recent headlines and the articles below it. First, I’ll congratulate you on fitting that much content into such a minimal space. Thats the good part. However, by cramming so much content you are cluttering up your blog’s lower half. The red headlines (which shouldn’t be red) make it easier to find each individual article, but the amount of words simply makes it hard to read. I would recommend that instead of 2 columns of recent headlines, I would have one column with a more prominent headline and have it spread out wider across. You will be able to fit more articles vertically and it will reduce the cluttered feeling.
The featured video spot is perfect. It grabs my attention and has an easy to navigate list of videos. Good work here. I am not a pro when it comes to embedding videos into a blog, but I am trying to think of how you could manage to make the video larger. It’s not horribly small, but yet it’s also not large enough for the best viewing quality.
The next thing I see as I move down your page is 4 columns. I think that 3 columns is cluttered, but 4! Not good for me. However I think there is an easy way to fix it. Take your “recent comments” section and put it in for the “archives” in the tabbed section. Take your “top commentors” and make it a tab in your tabbed section. That would turn the lower half of your blog into a 3 column layout and make it feel much more open. With your extra room you could make your recent readers section larger and more visible or add in more recent articles.
The popular tags section looks nice - but is it really needed? It has hardly any importance simply because it is in the farthest corner of your blog. Not only will less people see it, but how likely are they to click on it? You may know the answer, but I don’t. I don’t have a tag cloud on my blog because I really find them quite useless. If people want to know what I’m writing about, they will read my articles or search in my search bar. Simple as that.
The last thing I saw on your blog was your footer. Honestly, I’m disappointed. You are using a free theme. While this really shouldn’t be an issue, because I know that not everyone can afford a custom design, I think that a free theme on a blog that has such potential as yours should never be used. Again, I know it isn’t always affordable, but the “free design” feeling is a major turn off to readers like me. That is your choice to make on whether or not you think a custom theme will be worth it in the long run. If I were you, I would make the investment and if you keep placing your ads and are doing well enough with adsense, you should be able to pay it off in no time.
Before doing this review, I asked Mike to send me the URL to 3 of his favorite articles that he has written. Check them all out and leave Mike a comment!
DVD Picks…
Jack Bauer Goes To Jail…
Top 10 Christmas Movies
Conclusion
Well that is it for the review. Mike, I sincerely hope my opinions helped you and made you more aware of the design of your blog and how important it really is. If you have any questions or comments about my review, please feel free to comment here or drop me an email.
As for everyone else, be sure to check out A Mike Life to stay up to date with the latest in movies, books, TV, and technology.
Wow, I wasn’t expecting a review about the design as much as the content itself, but okay, let’s talk about what you said
First off, as you noted, the design is by Justin Tadlock, not me. However, since you have a problem with it, I will say this: I customized it big time and Justin even highlighted my theme as the #1 site “who took it and made it their own.”
I leave the credit on there for him, since it’s a talented designer…I’ve tried to give him as much credit as possible.
And as far as it being free, yes, it is, but I’ve never really seen a better free template out there and he could have sold this to me for $200 and I would have bought it. I guess whether or not I pay $200 or get it for free seems to determine whether or not you get turned off, but that’s not my problem.
The thing is, you can take any free theme out there, remove the credit to the person who did it and then make it your own with customiztion, and no one would ever know. Your theme here has a dark footer with links to place, but it’s something I’ve seen everywhere.
I think if I had taken the credit off, you’d never know it was a free template…so that’s interesting to me.
I’ve made so many changes to the template, and fixes, maybe I could call it my own? But I don’t, because Justin rocks at these things and I wont do it.
And like you said, I can’t afford $200-500 to get my own theme, mainly because while I take this blog seriously, I do a lot of it for fun. The ads just came up a few days ago, but I wont earn anywhere close to a living off them. I do this for fun.
As far as the color goes (as you mentioned it quite a few times), the (dark) red and black is only in the header, the rest of the site (the important part) is red on white.
“The red headlines (which shouldn’t be red) make it easier to find each individual article”
Not sure why they can’t be red? Nothing is hard on the eyes, or unpleasant.
Also, the red on black…I don’t know if it’s bad or not. I certainly have never heard one person dislike it, in fact, most people have raved about the new theme for the site (which I put in over Thanksgiving). The main thing to note is that it’s not standard red, but a darker red.
Glad you liked the logo, it was all my idea and I put it together, so I’m quite proud of it!
As far as the individual blocks of content below the featured post, yeah, it’s got a lot of stuff, but it’s supposed to look more like a magazine than anything else. I don’t like scrolling all the way down a page to find a post I want to read. I can see 12 of them with one page down on my theme.
I guess you could look at it like four columns, but it’s never felt that way for me, especially if you are up top and see it’s only two columns to start and breaks down into 4ish.
The real funny part about the whole thing is that my frontpage is the least viewed page on the site. All my Google traffic skips it and most of my readers use a Blog Reader and go right to posts.
Also, the part about the big RSS button. That whole thing you showed above, with your name, welcoming you back, IS the RSS thing. It asks you to subscribe, I have a little icon and I also have a mail subscription area, which you cut off of your image capture.
Maybe my icon could be bigger, but you don’t think that area is big enough or close enough to the top? If anything, you should add in the form field to directly put in an email address on the frontpage! I got that from Court and Vic
Glad you liked the images…I do edit them all to fit for the featured story and the thumbnails below. As far as the YouTube video, they could be bigger I guess, but it would break the width of the column…or shorten the links you click on for the next video.
And like I said, not sure how many people actually sit on the frontpage and watch them…seems like most click right into the article.
I appreciate your time in checking my site out. I too have done a lot of web design in the past and do some graphical layouts at my real job for user interfaces, so I tend to get a bit defensive when I see critiques!
But this was good and has me thinking about a few things.
Oh, by the way…on a side note, on this site…you should check how it looks in Firefox, because you’ve got some problems at the top of the page.
Mike - I’m not going to start defending myself - but I will say this: This review was intended to give my opinions. Not bash or anything. I hope there are no hard feelings in this.
I’m going to keep this brief because you have pretty much covered yourself on my whole review. I will start with colors and say that it is all a matter of taste. Mine is different from yours, so if the colors are working for you, by all means keep them.
The RSS - like I said, I like it. No problems there.
As for the 4 column deal, yes it is very handy to have 12 articles on the front page like you said. Again, my personal thing is simplistic and uncluttered.
As for the free theme: I apologize for jumping to conclusions. I should have done more research into it. If you have customized it to your taste, that is excellent. I didn’t take time to look at the original design so I couldn’t tell. I hope that I didn’t offend you.
I just want to say that if everything is working for you - keep it and ignore me. The whole purpose of this was to get an in-depth look at your own sight from someone else’s (my) eyes.
As for my own site, I’m using firefox and everything is perfect - what are your screen dimensions? I would like to take a look into what the issues are, so please let me know.
Thanks Mike for your comment and allowing me the chance to review your blog.
Brian
I do appreciate your review, especially since I asked for it
And my natural reaction is to defend myself, since I usually feel strongly about designs I create or use…it’s just how I am
This is what I see when I look at your page. I’m at 1280×900 resolution and running on Ubuntu.
http://www.amikelife.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/elitebydesign.jpg
I’m on a 1280×800 macbook. So our screen width is the same. I wonder if it is Ubuntu. This is what I see:
http://elitebydesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/preview10.png
And it’s totally cool for you to get defensive - as long as we aren’t pist at each other