My New Ebook Marketing Site Needs YOUR Review!

[BoK]

Dear Forum Friends,

This new ebook marketing/ebook business website (URL below) is the fruit of many months of labour in terms of planning, design, and testing. If you could do me the honour of visiting the site and take it for a quick spin and give me your straightforward comments, complaints, and questions, I would be most grateful!

I would be very interested in hearing if you experience any technical problems, for example that the page looks strange in some way, with misplaced layout elements, or buttons, etc. I sincerely hope that most of the issues revolving around cross-platform compatibility are already solved. But with so many pcs and macs with different operating systems and hardware and browsers and browser versions, it is not very easy to guarantee a perfect display performance. These are the eight configurations which I so far have tested (7 successfully, 1 close to successfully) on: on pcs: internet explorer 6 and up, firefox, opera, safari, and chrome; on macs: firefox, safari, opera.

My plans for this site is that I am, in the first phase, developing traffic. My main traffic-generating method will be article marketing, in which I try to write new articles not only for my own site, but also for sites such as ezinearticles.com, squidoo.com, and hubpages.com. It is my estimation that I will be able to produce approximately 3-4 new articles per week. But we'll see. I rather go for quality than quantity, so I have to see where this leads me. But that's the plan, anyway.

The website is basically a Wordpress blog with a theme that I have designed myself using a great piece of software called Artisteer (which I recommend). I also of course used Photshop and other software. There is also lots of my own HTML pasted in ordinary text gadgets (the ads). I am running WP 2.8.5 and I have approximately 10 different plugins. If there is something you are interested in for your own blog, just ask.

I also want to thank Lynn not only for managing this nice forum for all of us, but also for her inspiration in her free Tuesday webinars. There is so much to learn, and only 24 hours a day! And then, on top of that, one has to actually make some money too! Jesus! )

In any case, feel free to suggest new things, and also to ask me about any details that you may be interested in, whether technical, marketing-oriented, or otherwise.

Best wishes,
Bo
http://www.ebookbrothers.com
"Get Your Ebook Out There!"

[Ellen C Braun]

Hi Bo,

After a quick perusal of the site, I'd say it looks quite good.

My big question would be- what do you want people to do when they land on that page? Sign up, buy something, read something, click an ad? There are so many options that people may just click away because they're unsure what to do. On the other hand, lots of popular sites have many, many options and links and still do well- but I feel they'd do better with a more focused message on each site, and a couple of links along one nav bar.

[BoK]

Hi Ellen,

First of all, thanks for the review!

>> what do you want people to do when they land on that
>> page? Sign up, buy something, read something, click an ad?
>> There are so many options that people may just click away
>> because they're unsure what to do. On the other hand, lots
>> of popular sites have many, many options and links and still
>> do well- but I feel they'd do better with a more focused
>> message on each site, and a couple of links along one nav bar.

The design of the page is not a result of some lazy afternoon speculation, but a very serious attempt to accomplish a certain marketing strategy. As with any "ordinary" webpage (as opposed to a typical mini-site designed only to hard-sell ONE product) one typically wants one's visitors to do MULTIPLE things, not just ONE thing. But each of those things, of course, may be more or less desirable, depending on the exact marketing strategy for that website.

In my own case, my marketing strategy is to cater to people who already have, or are very close to having, their credit cards in their hands. I am thus not overly concerned with people who are interested in "free information" and who never buys. In my own experience as a full-time copywriter working with international direct marketing projects with true advertising professionals, I would say the following: people who are "doers" (as opposed to "procrastinators") will not get very confused when coming to my page. They have a goal, and they now see a page that not only contains an article that they searched for, but also contains products and services in closely related niches that they may find very useful.

However, for visitors who are not TRULY interested in the subject matter (either because they didn't succeed in typing in the right keywords in their search engine, or because they simply don't know what they are looking for, or for some other reason), or who are not potential buyers, may not have the same tolerance and interest in trying to "decipher" the page. But that's OK, for they are not potential customers anyway.

So, as is admirably exhibited by Amazon.com and many others, a "busy" design (by a typographer and graphical designer who knows what he or she is doing) doesn't prohibit anyone who is really interested in buying from buying products. So if Amazon is doing it, instead of doing a "clean" page, we can be sure that it is a very well tested strategy known to produce maximum profits.

So what I want the visitors to my website to do is to either buy a product, or sign up to the newsletter, or read an article (and click on some affiliate link), or all of them. Simple! :-)

Thanks again for you input, Ellen!

Bo
EbookBrothers.com
Ebook Marketing & Ebook Writing

[jkgourmet]

I'm feeling the same way. the four column set up is just overload. I'm also not a fan of the grey background, makes me feel like my eyes are tired, but that may just be me. Or maybe they really are tired. . .

[BoK]

Hi Jeanette,

Just a quick note to show my appreciation for your response to the review.

I am sorry to hear that you don't like the four-column design. But I know others who like it very much.

You may want to also read the responses that I made to Ellen and Shelwriter, for I explain in some detail about why I chose that design. Also, my rationale for choosing a design that doesn't fit into Adriana's page, but fits into yours, is explained in my post to her (which is coming up soon).

Best wishes and thanks again!

Bo
EbookBrothers.com
Publish Your E-book Online!

[Adriana]

You want honest opinions, right?

For me, the gray background color doesn't do anything: it's a sad color, and it may be hard for some people to read. Your text is also a darker shade of gray, and the blue color of the links is faded. You need a little more contrast on your page.

Your page is very wide: I only see 2/3 of the page, and to see the rest I need to scroll sideways.

Also, as mentioned before, there are too many ads, and those clutter up the pages.

HTH.

[jkgourmet]

You want honest opinions, right?



Your page is very wide: I only see 2/3 of the page, and to see the rest I need to scroll sideways.



HTH.

Interesting. I have a 22" screen and still have room leftover on the sides. . .

[BoK]

Jeanette,

>> Interesting. I have a 22" screen and still have room leftover on the sides. . .

It's great that you have a 22" screen, but that is not why you still have room leftover on the sides. The reason you have room leftover on the sides is because you are using a greater screen RESOLUTION than Adriana does.

In fact, since you say there is "room leftover", it seems to indicate that you have your resolution set to something greater than 1280 by 1024 pixels.

So the idea is that, even with a 22" physical size screen, you may adjust the screen resolution up and down. If your video card is as most video cards, you should, for example, be able to adjust your resolution downwards so that you can emulate Adriana's resolution (which presumably is 1024 by 768 pixels).

In other words, the physical size of your screen is not an indication of how great the resolution is when you turn your computer on. It depends on your settings.

Hoping you're well!

Bo
EbookBrothers.com
Get Your Own Ebook Out There!"

[BoK]

Hi Adriana,

Thanks for the review! It's great to get some HONEST opinion!

>> For me, the gray background color doesn't do anything:
>> it's a sad color, and it may be hard for some people to read.
>> Your text is also a darker shade of gray, and the blue color
>> of the links is faded. You need a little more contrast on your page.

== GRAY BACKGROUND ==

One thing to remember is that different monitors can have VERY different characteristics, even after one has calibrated them into their "default" position. The difference in monitor performance can not only be seen in terms of the color balance, but also in terms of brightness and contrast. Thus, what one person perceives as "low contrast" might be NOT seen by another, displaying the exact same page on another computer screen.

What complicates the issue even more is that there is also the freedom of the users to manually adjust the screen color balance, the brightness, and the contrast, which gives rise to a considerable number of combinations, all of which are out of control for the designer of the website.

So what is an intelligent and hard-working web designer to do, then? A reasonable philosophy is, I think, to do the following, in order to provide a design that will, on average, be acceptable to one's visitors.

Since rendering the page of a website depends not only on the monitor, but also on the browser and the operating system used, one must practically try one's design on multiple combinations of hardware and software. So what I have done is to test my designs on both Macintosh and PC computers, using five different browsers, and five different monitors, each of which is calibrated on its own. As if that was not enough, one must also, of course, test the page with different screen resolutions, since the readability of the page varies with that too. (And I have also done that.)

In any case, the background I have chosen is color "#F5F5F5". This is, according to my own color scheme denomination NOT any "gray", but an "off-white" color. I estimate this color to be approximately 96% white, and therefore only very slightly "gray". My extensive testing across different monitors and computers show that some monitors do not even display any difference between the full white (#FFFFFF) and the off-white (#F5F5F5), although, of course, some others do.

The lesson here, I think, is that if one perceives the off-white to be SIGNIFICANTLY gray, then one either has a poor monitor, or a monitor that is badly adjusted. For a user who experiences the off-white as significantly gray, I would say that the very same user also would perceive anything designed to be fully white (#FFFFFF) ALSO as gray or gray-ish. So I am not particularly concerned with this issue, although it is interesting to hear your experience of it.

== WIDE PAGE ==

You say "Your page is very wide: I only see 2/3 of the page, and to see the rest I need to scroll sideways."

Yes, that's all right. That means that you most probably are using a screen resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels. I have of course thought of such users in advance, and made sure that not only the opt-in form is displayed for such users, but also that all the "main" text of the article is fully readable. The only thing that gets cut off wholly is the fourth column to the right.

The reason why I have not decided to OPTIMIZE the performance for a monitor having 1024 by 768 pixels is simply because too few users are using that resolution right now. Thus, when designing web pages, one must be careful to design for the MAJORITY of users, regardless of what one's own monitor resolution is.

So according to W3Schools.com ongoing report of how many users are using different screen resolution, the majority of users in January of 2009 were using screen resolutions HIGHER than 1024 by 768 pixels. (I think the exact figure was 59% of all users). So that would mean that one would have to design for a greater resolution; therefore, I have designed everything for 1280 by 1024 pixels.

One should also remember that that report of number of users using particular screen resolutions was almost a year ago; and if one extrapolates the previous years' figures, it may very well be that, say, 70 or 75% of all users are, right now, using screen resolutions greater than 1024 by 768 pixels. In any case, the trend is clear. And my design is based on actual statistics like this.

Note, however, that my OPTIMIZING the page for 1280 by 1024 pixels is not another way of saying that I have not taking the 1024 by 768 pixels into consideration when I designed the page. Actually, I did take into consideration also the 1024 by 768 pixels resolution in the design phase, by adjusting all column widths and placements of layout elements so that also such users would be able to get a nice page that would not omit any crucial areas (opt-in area, main article text column, etc.) of the page more than necessary.

OK, I think that's it for now. And thanks again Adriana for your input!

Bo
EbookBrothers.com
Publish Your Own Ebooks Online!