You probably noticed our semi-absence over the last few weeks. Though we ran a fresh installment of Available Darkness each Friday, and our multi-part series looking back on our first year, we were ghostwriters in more ways than one. We wrote the entire series at once, then set each piece to schedule while Dave and I stepped back and started plotting where to take the Inkwell.

Like so many blogs, the Inkwell began as a brainstorm with a very loosely defined endgame. Looking back, I think we wanted to work together and that was enough. We knew we could write and handle some basic designs – nicely tailored clothes on the fit Thesis figure. But more than anything else, we knew there was extraordinary potential in our partnership.

The year was long and we’ve worked our asses to marrow. I’m proud to call Dave one of the best friends I’ve ever had and a remarkable partner; able to both absorb and expand upon my ambitions.

After more than a year of working together, we now know precisely what we want for our Collective.

Sometimes you have to dig around in the soil before you know what you really want to plant.

As the new header suggests, the Inkwell is now a site for authors. Dave and I are knee deep writing and publishing work for ourselves, as well as for our clients. It makes perfect sense that we balloon the experience.

I’ll talk more about that on Wednesday. In fact, I already have the post written. It was supposed to go out today.

But there was no way I could run it after I saw the work Dave did on this site. It’s gorgeous. It speaks volumes above the fold and I absolutely love it.

So thanks, Dave. For being an awesome partner and brilliant collaborator. You’ve built and rebuilt a staggering amount of sites for us this year and you’re only getting better.

And now, a word from the designer…

Thanks, Sean. Thank you to everyone who has been following Collective Inkwell. I never feel comfortable when people call me a designer. I’m not a code ninja like some of the great designers I admire. I’m a cartoonist by trade, who happens to utilize the best of Wordpress and themes like Thesis and Frugal to create some great looking and super functional sites.

As an artist, I believe in using the best tools for the job. Right now there are no better web development tools that I know of than Wordpress backed by a killer theme and killer customization.

So while Sean and I were dipping into the waters of publication with our own work and for our ghostwriting clients, we noticed a disturbing trend – a lot of authors have sucky sites. In this day of Wordpress powered sites, there is no excuse for anyone to have a horrible static one page site on some freebie site.

There has never been a better time for a writer to craft a brand online.

Which brings us to this design, version 3.0 of Collective Inkwell.

In shifting our focus to serve writers, we want to showcase the creative possibilities of Wordpress, a great theme and design. We decided to make over our own blog.

I’ve toyed with ink splotches since before Inkwell 1.0 went live. I must have come up with 40 different mockups involving ink or an inkwell, but I hated each of the concepts I came up with. They all seemed a bit too gothy. While gothy can look good, I felt it was a bit overused at the time of the Inkwell’s launch and didn’t capture what I was looking for.

I went back to the lab and thought about not just ink, but words. So our first design sported a typography-inspired look, with a focus on text. It was dark and it looked cool.

(click any of the images below to biggify them)

Inkwell 1.0 – Dark, moody, cool.

Unfortunately, it was a bit too dark according to some readers. While you can’t please everyone, I try to find some middle ground when it comes to one of the most important websites in our portfolio. While I thought the design looked nice, it was a bit too dark for me to look at day after day. So for Version 2, we went a bit lighter, with a so fresh and so clean clean white and black look.

Inkwell 2.0 – Uber clean; enough open space to plant a forest.

While I like this design and it looked especially good when we utilized colorful graphics in the content, I was never happy with the sidebar navigation. It seemed a waste of space – particularly at a site devoted to wide open space.

This design utilized a sketchy font and graphics, which was meant to show the nature of the site as something in the process of constant creation. We might have left this site up a while longer, but when we decided to shift the focus of Collective Inkwell, I felt a change in appearance was a must.

So, now we present you with Collective Inkwell 3.0.

I wanted to do something completely different, yet return to the roots of my first design concepts – ink. I also dipped into the past for color inspiration. The background color is just a shade off of Inkwell 1.0’s background. This version also utilizes a lot of black, just like the first. Yet, the use of softer warm tones balances the colder, dark colors for a unique experience. I also carried over some of the big type we used in 1.0, particularly in the sidebar graphics.

The header’s ocean of churning, roiling ink is in reference to both the collective nature of my partnership with Sean and the greater collective nature of the artistic community in which we exist. To us, stories hold a powerful magic. They help to transform not only our souls, but also help to shape the world around us.

We’ll talk more about our services and what’s ahead in the coming year. Those who have been reading along this far, even if you’re not writers, we hope to offer you useful tips, advice and information in the coming months. And, of course, Available Darkness will continue to run each Friday.

Thank you, as always, for reading. We look forward to this new incarnation of Collective Inkwell and sharing the collective experience with you all.

-David

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Your blog is awesome, you’ve got lots of killer content and some regular readers. But what about those eyes that fall on your blog for the first time? Are you losing opportunity because your blog doesn’t create a strong enough first impression?

Do you have

• an ugly blog that makes small children cry and your dog cover his eyes with his paws?
• a boring blog with zero zing?
• or a blog that fails to stand out in a sea of sameness?

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The Collective Inkwell can help you.

Welcome to the first edition of Collective Inkwell’s Make Over My Blog! This is the place for no-holds-barred opinions on how to take your blog from average to awesome! We might get a bit snarky from time to time. Nothing personal, we just want to make the posts entertaining for as many readers as possible.

Our first makeover is Law School Bound

The Home page

Our first impression of the home page is, “Hey, I’ve seen this blog before. In fact, I’ve seen it about 400 times.”

Why?

Kristina is using a free theme, something we will address in a bit. The blog is clean and pleasant looking enough, so clean it’s almost sterile. In fact, it has no visual trace of the personality behind it.

click for full size

So, who is the personality behind Law School Bound? Let’s find out.

The About page

The About page starts with the sentence, “First and foremost, I am a dancer. Always have been, always will be”.

Okay, that’s nice, but who are you?

Nowhere on the About Page is the blog author’s name or photo.

Only after visiting the Resume page do I find out that the site is written by Kristina Duncan. The About page NEEDS to let readers know something about both the blog they are visiting and the person behind the blog.

What is this blog  about (she said she likes dancing, but it doesn’t SEEM like a dance blog)?

Why is this site on the web?

Why should I come back?

These are the questions a proper About page should instantly answer.

Another thing Kristina may want to consider – using a photo on her About page. Given that she uses it on her Twitter page (good luck finding that – see further down the page); she should consider using it on her blog. Kristina’s an attractive young woman and could use that to her advantage. Regardless of what we think about this, the fact is that people are attracted to attractive people. Heck, if I were half as photogenic as Kristina, I’d have a 1,000 pixel wide photo on every page of my site. Okay, not really, but you get the idea.

Theme

Kristina’s theme is the ubiquitous PRESSROW, by Chris Pearson. We love Pearson’s blogs and are using his premium Thesis theme here at Collective Inkwell. I like PRESSROW for its simplicity and intuitive navigation scheme.

Because PRESSROW is a good (and free) theme, it’s a bit overused. Generally speaking, unless you are producing great content that separates you from the pack; it will be hard to distinguish your blog from the many others using the same theme as so many other bloggers. Well, unless you do something to customize it.

Header and navigation

I’m not a big fan of the huge banner, though I do like the picture of the books. I’m even less a fan of the large navigation text, which takes up a good chunk of the screen. The navigation above the header is also redundant since the pages are also linked to in the sidebar. I would ditch the above-the-header navigation.

Kristina may want to shorten the navigation text. For example: instead of ‘My Resume’, use ‘Resume’. Instead of ‘My Favorite Blogs’, use ‘Links’ or ‘Resources’. Instead of ‘Ramblings of a Pretend Writer’, perhaps change it to ‘Ramblings’ or ‘Writing(s)’.

If she wants to stand out from the crowd, but wants to keep this theme, a good idea would be to create her own custom header which shows the uniqueness of her blog (or hire someone to do it for her – hint hint).

Pages

Looking around the site, I spotted a link to Kristina’s ‘My Favorite Blogs’ page. Curious to see what other sites she likes, I clicked and was surprised to see a page with only one link!

Talk about being selective!

To make matters worse, the one link she has isn’t even to a blog, but rather a Twitter page that no longer exists. Perhaps she should rename the page to ‘My Favorite Deleted Twitter Accounts”.

Speaking of deleted Twitter accounts… don’t click on Kristina’s Twitter link on the front page or you’ll end up at another deleted account. For those that are curious, her Twitter account can be found here: http://twitter.com/legalninjaKris Readers shouldn’t have to come here to find it, though.

Content

The blog reads well and is inviting enough to get me to want to know Kristina more. However, I have issues with some of the content. Namely, typos.

Just a few of the typos I spotted:  spelling venue without an ‘e’ and morter instead of mortar and use of the word through rather than threw on her About page.

Given that Kristina posted her resume on this site, I am guessing that she wants to attract clients? If that’s the case, she should pay special attention to details which might turn a client/employer off, especially on a page that will see consistent traffic over the life of the blog.

When I see typos, I usually give the person the benefit of the doubt, especially when I see content that shows they’re better educated than 95.7% of MySpace users. However, I instinctively wonder if someone spelled a word wrong because they don’t know better or because they were in a rush.

The minute my eyes hit a typo, it’s like a road bump impeding my progress just long enough to distract me from what the author is attempting to say.

Kristina is obviously a smart woman who is on the road to success. She would do well to show that by proofreading before hitting PUBLISH.

More problems

From her “Ramblings of a Pretend Writer” page, is a sentence which should NEVER be on a blog aiming at professionalism.

“This is where I will post my attempt at fiction which should include my post ‘pain in her soul’ as the first installment.  Now I just have to figure out how to move it over.  Hmmm…”

If she doesn’t know, she needs to find out.

But since I’m already here – there are two things I can suggest. Change this from a static page to one that shows items in a particular category, such as “Writing” which her ‘pain in her soul’ posts is tagged as. Option two would be to use the static page as an introduction with links to the appropriate pages.

SEO

If her blog is more than a hobby, it is essential to know her audience. To whom is she speaking? Knowing this essential bit of information will not only help Kristina write with clarity, it will also allow her to implement basic SEO with ease. SEO can be complicated, but knowing your audience will make the fundamentals feel far more natural.

The good:

• The blog has a clean look, lots of white space
• RSS button is nice and big and easily found
• Content is good overall. Kristina writes well and is likable
• The navigation is intuitive
• The site is free from annoying ads, or other sidebar clutter that litters so many a blog across Blogopolis these days

The bad:

• About page doesn’t really tell me much about you or the blog
• The navigation bar takes up too much space
• Twitter link is broken
• Favorite blogs page has no actual favorite blogs
• Unclear audience and no SEO in place

The ugly:

This page displays several lines of html coding that SHOULD HAVE been inserted in the html edit mode, not the visual mode. Given that the post is two months old and is still busted, it gives the impression that you don’t edit your posts and check them once live.

Thanks Kristina for volunteering to be our first Make Over My Blog! victim volunteer. Most of the changes we suggested are ones you can easily implement yourself. Should you want help, you can hire us at a discount and we can handle all your Blog Makeover needs.

Note to readers: We got a lot of responses to our free consultation offer, so we’ll be hitting those twice a month and are closing the free offer for now until we catch up.

However, if you’d like us to Make Over your blog immediately,  we have a few slots open.

If you would like a private consultation, our services can be had for a small fee of $60 via PayPal.  You can choose whether you want your review publicly posted on our site or private, sent to you via e-mail. And, if you pay us, you can choose how you want your advice: Straight up and a bit kinder (for those who don’t appreciate snarky criticism) or with full snarkiness intact. We definitely understand a lot of people don’t have the time or skills to devote to making their blog pretty and we would never want to make anyone feel bad.

If you decide to hire us for a consult, we will deduct $25 from your first custom design order.

Some of the things we can do to make over your blog

• customize your WP Thesis theme
• Install Thesis on your self hosted WP site
• create unique custom illustrations (banners and other site graphics) from a professional cartoonist for any web site.
• craft custom SEO and landing pages to help your blog be found by search engines and readers
• devise a custom color theme for your WP blog
• advise you on the best usability practices on the web
• help you determine which items to keep on your blog and which to get rid of
• ghost write copy for your site

Got more questions or want to hire us? Contact us at collectiveinkwell AT gmail.com.

Agree with our assessment of Kristina’s site? Or think we’re nuts? Leave a comment below. If you like this post, please consider tweeting it.

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