It’s odd, today I just posted in a series on Wordpress for Beginners how to change your theme. John Chow yesterday hinted that he was about to change his theme on WordPress.

Well, John Chow has brought out a new theme for his blog, it’s official today, and I must confess, I liked the preview but I HATE the final version. It’s rare for me to blog about someone else’s theme (but I’m sure that’s part of John’s plan: to get comments and feedback… hehe! Evil, really evil!)

That’s not that I hate anything individually in the blog, the colors are fine, the layout is overall not bad, and the images are plentiful and gorgeous. It befits a website (in some respect) as it’s built for the future. But as a visual improvement, it comes at a cost: bandwidth, time and usability.

1. I saved the entire frontpage to disk to measure the amount of space that it would take. Answer 2.3MB. Though that includes the wonderful Tandoori meal he had (but even they were only 60K EACH!) It takes longer to load, and on some connections will be way too slow. On dialup as most of the States still is, it would be excruciating to wait for the front page to download. True, subsequent pages would take less time, though. But that’s a huge initial hit. It would take over 5 minutes and 47 seconds to watch that first page load!

2. The top of the page that runs from Home down to the first Date is all I see on my screen. I barely get a title of a blogpost. Instead, I get a major picture, a bunch of articles I already read, numerous affiliate schemes on the right, which I know about; and the RSS Feeds (I get). This is no wonder that John Cow writes “No wonder one of the two sports cars had to go, they ran out of parking spots.”

John Cow goes on to write:

You can say what you want about the new design, love it or hate it. It won’t stop you from visiting the blog though and only increase Mr. Chow’s earnings. And more earnings will translate in more visitors who again will bring in more revenue. It’s a win win situation for everyone! What do you guys think? Should we go shopping for a new theme too?

And on that point, I think John Cow is wrong. The usability experience of his blog has been pushed to the extreme. As on my 1020×768 screen, I barely see anything worth using, and I know that 54% of my viewers use this or less! Can you imagine what you see on on smaller screen? It’s likely that unless John changes the top heavy part of the screen that I will not be as frequent a visitor as in the past. I don’t doubt that he will be able to bring in extra cash with the extra spots, but I’m afraid that he will increasingly drive away regulars for a variety of reasons, especially usability reasons – bandwidth, monitor space, and heady images!

3. Increasingly the weight of affiliates, sales, links and text ads is beginning to make the sell ‘oversell’. Are you selling Sizzle or Steak? I wonder increasingly that you are doing your blog a disservice. Of course, you set out to push the envelope in terms of money making ideas and experiments. I’m sure this new theme is part of that process, too. But now I’m beginning to wonder if you are pushing a little too far. Darren Rowse renewed his theme, and though it looks a little staid by comparison, it’s much more user friendly. Take a look and see what I mean!

That’s pretty much how I see it on this screen. I have adds on the left, but I also have content that I can go to: three posts with descriptions on two of them AND a video. Of course, the more content I can find, the more chance you have to show me ads that I can read and click on. But if all I see is huge graphics files that take 5 minutes to download, I might very well click away before I even see anything. Now compare this with what I see on John’s blog now:

Visually, John’s does have more impact, but I wonder which one generates longer visits on the website. Moreover, as 2/3rds of readers tend to read their entire articles ONCE they decide to read something, good design should make it easier to find good articles by giving clues on the content: descriptive titles and summaries. Why make it hard for readers to decide these things?

I could make some suggestions. John, I think your BLOG is great, but your design is way over the top for the reasons I outlined here. Please, put your readers first! And get some regular visitors to test out the usability and effectiveness of your new design, and do check up on those who access via other means: mobile or dialup where bandwidth is still a premium price. So, in three words, TONE IT DOWN!

InvestorBlogger has written about a number of mortgage websites in the past. We were asked to write a short review about MortgageMart.com.

When the client or visitor takes a trip to MortgageMart.com, a wonderfully rich image fills the screen. Take a look yourself to see what I mean. The evocative image of a large house nestled among some trees along the end of a driveway is probably how most visitors imagine their dream house. Mortgage mart neatly captivates its audience by implying that you, too, can have your own castle by filling out a free mortgage quote (which you can see on the right).

The website’s function is simple to provide a home loan quote for different types of loans: Refinance, Home Equity Loan, Purchase Loan, and Debt Consolidation for homes. Additional drop down menus are for Home Types, Credit Rating, and of course your state. Once you’ve filled in the four criteria, clicking ‘submit’ is supposed to take you to a ‘free quote’ provided by the LendingTree.com. Unfortunately when I tried this, I kept getting the following error.

This is definitely not good for business. So I next looked at some of the other links above the picture. So then I tried to find out which website provides their services, and each time I clicked on different offers, I was taken to the same site: http://www.lendingtree.com. Unfortunately, the only way I could get their site information was by accessing Google’s Cache. Their site is down, too, right now. Without their main site, there isn’t so much to do on the website itself. I guess the good thing is the site is quite responsive.

It’s quite clear that the website is intended to be attractive to first time buyers who won’t necessarily be as informed about the mortgage market when taking out their first mortgage loan. Though the types of loans offered suggest some sophistication, there are a number of issues that I think this website raises:

1. if the outage is just occasional like tonight’s, then I think there is no problem. But if there are frequent problems, then this needs to be dealt with. Casual visitors aren’t likely to be impressed by such problems, and will head to the address bar or Google Search to find another lender whose website isn’t down.
2. they claim to find the right mortgage for you based on four types of information, yet each search takes you to the same website, though I’d presume to different sections (but I can’t verify that);
3. given that the site doesn’t ask for financial information, it’s difficult to imagine that the loans information provided would be all that useful, though it can provide a good starting point to negotiate with your lenders;
4. within each state, there is a huge difference in property between the urban, suburban and rural settings, yet there is no way to include such information, making any loans or rates suggested highly general;
5. there is no link to any TOS, privacy policy, contact information, or even “about pages”, which really doesn’t help to build trust with new clients, many of whom might be quite nervous dealing online.
6. general claims like “we’ve been doing this a long time” don’t really cut it when you don’t say who ‘we’ are. I even tried a ‘whois’ search to find out who the owners are. Many records are now marked ‘private’ (mine are) and so was this website’s. Alexa’s WayBackMachine provided some information, but nothing I could verify as ‘current’.
7. Some of the articles that are provided seem somewhat generic, and don’t read very well. Though care is taken with spelling, occasional use of odd words (imputing) and punctuation issues suggest that a good copywriter needs to be employed to go over the text and edit thoroughly.

Summary: this website really has a lot of potential. It’s visually attractive and simple to use. But it clearly needs to find ways to deal with the issues raised.

This is a sponsored review.

Have you ever wanted to publish a book? Most of us feel that we have something in us that we could write about. Up until recently, getting published was a really difficult choice for most would-be writers, but the digital age has eased the process to such a point that it is possible, and even profitable to write books.

AuthorHouse is one such company born in the digital age that helps would-be writers take their first tentative steps, in determining your goals, submitting your manuscript, marketing your books, as well as designing and printing them. There are some inspiring stories that you can read about their authors in their case studies pages as well find their books in the bookstore.

Whatever services they provide, though, it’s a good idea to make sure that their website is functional. I clicked on many of the pages on the right side of the homepage, and got frequent script errors that looked ugly. You can see the graphic to see what I mean.

This is likely only to create an unprofessional image and chase away new authors as well as customers and casual visitors. So fix the problems, or at least, create an attractive error page!