Constructive Feedback from Aniblog Tourney

May 20, 2010 in Commentary, Site Related by Tom Langston (calaggie) | 2 comments

I am currently losing to zzeroparticle of Anime Instrumentality in my 2nd round match of the current Aniblog Tourney (zzero’s 120 votes to my 43, as of 5/21 12:30PM PDT) and I’m okay with that because I know I haven’t been doing the best job with this blog and I also like zzero’s stuff. I was a little surprised when the seedings came out and I was seeded 21st with a first-round bye – I think the age of posts might have been a factor in that. I don’t recall who said this when the tournament began but it’s an opportunity for me to look critically at my own operation and determine how I can improve the look and the content.

In the comments section of the match post (where you can vote for this blog if you’d like until May 24, I think), there were some remarks pointing out things that I already knew.

Canne: Without any hesitation, I voted for zzeroparticle because of the blog’s shear quality. I actually think Nigorimasen is good, too. I just don’t like the orange letters -_- #

Baka-Raptor: I like AI a lot. I ended up voting for it, but I gave Nigorimasen very serious consideration even though I’ve never read it before. The deal-breaker was that Nigorimasen does a lot of industry posts, which has even less to do with anime than anime music. #

Josh on his eponymous Anime Blog has been writing about his choices in each matchup and said my content was fine but my design was quirky and my post rate was not so good (here’s an earlier post by Josh explaining his criteria):

Design: Is it just me, or is the background for the entire page on Nigorimasen! gray?  Also, while it’s not a big deal, I kind of always disliked pages shoved off to one side of the screen or another instead of being centered.  And the gray thing is bothering me.  Anime Instrumentality may not be the slickest looking blog out there, but there isn’t really anything particularly bad about it.  Winner: Anime Instrumentality

Post Rate/Style: On post rate, Nigorimasen! has posted only 10 times since the first of March, if my count is correct.  That’s less than once a week, which is clearly in my danger category.  Otherwise, I don’t see anything particularly wrong with their post style.  Anime Instrumentality also has an issue with posting a lot, though they did decent in March, and it seems to be better than Nigorimasen! in any case.  Though, I guess when one is writing mostly about anime OSTs, you can only write posts so often too.  I also like how they have music samples intermixed in their posts.  Winner: Anime Instrumentality

Content: I think Nigorimasen has a lot of good, well written content on his blog, especially about the CPM situation. He just doesn’t post a lot.  Meanwhile, Anime Instrumentality is able to write quite a bit, despite being a blog about OSTs…and they have samples!  I think this category is very close, but it goes to AI by a nose. Winner: Anime Instrumentality

Overall: Another sweep.  I think Nigorimasen’s lack of posting and quirky design really hurt it.

Winner: Anime Instrumentality

The current blog design is not ideal – I’ve crudely coded the CSS to allow for a wider, er, width and the left alignment is off a bit, which bugged me initially and I seem to have gotten used to over the past several months. The orange color for links is a conscious choice because I didn’t feel like settling for the standard blue or black. It’s also an attempt to grab people’s attention but I suppose a well-styled overall design would do a better job of that than just the text color. The gray background is intended to be not as bright as a white background and hopefully improve visual readability but I can understand if it bothers some people.

The lack of regular posting is primarily due to a diminished fire-burning-within-me motivation to read/watch things quickly & then write about them (mainly caused by now having a day job) and secondarily, not wanting to just write commentary on many news stories where I don’t have too much to add to the existing posts that have already been written by others.

While writing this, I looked back to a post I wrote last June about my belated 3-year “aniblogiversary” (last Friday was my four-year anniversary – yay!) and saw that I didn’t “feel like I’m an A-list aniblogger” and know what, that’s not a bad thing. I don’t want to write things I’m not proud of. The lack of comments on some posts still occasionally bothers me, though.

Closing out and coming back to design, the harder of the two areas to fix – readers: do you have any suggestions on how I can improve the aesthetics of the blog, e.g. switch to a black background? How about banner content or other features? Feel free to suggest improvements to the written content as well.

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  1. Narutaki’s avatar

    Narutaki on May 21, 2010 at 12:20 pm

    It is only a suggestion, but for most standards your post width is a little too big especially considering your text size. Something between 400px to 700px makes readability better overall (though personally I find 700 even a little much at times). I actually really like the gray background, we also use a (very) slight gray background. And as a person who once used orange on their own blog, I can tell you the complaints were there. I love orange, I want to use it but it is a difficult color because of monitor brightness and color settings more than others it seems. Maybe try and more red-orange?

    The blog is good so I’m glad you are taking the feedback positively and thinking of ways to build on it.

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  2. Prede’s avatar

    Prede on May 23, 2010 at 2:08 pm

    As I told you on twitter, my only real suggestion to you is to really change the background. While grey is “ok”, and much better then white, I’ve always felt that darker backgrounds, mostly black looked much better on blogs. That’s just my opinion of course, you should do what you feel is right of course. But I do think black would look really nice. But there’s nothing really “wrong” with your current design, it’s just sort of boring. It just sits there, neither grabbing our attention, nor bothering us. I don’t really mine the left alignment, and if you keep the blog like this, the orange links look nice. Much better then blue at least. Oh and please don’t give up on the industry posts. That’s how I found your blog in the first place, when you were talking about Geneon and CPM way back when. And it’s what kept me coming back ^.^ . Of course it be nice to read a review of something you’ve seen and enjoyed, or some other random stuff a little more often too. Best of both worlds?

    Anyway…I feel your pain on lack of comments. I’ll take my time, write this long interesting review of some anime on my blog…and no one will comment -_-. That kills me inside a little bit. Anyway best of luck to you and your blog. And even if you don’t survive this round of the tourney , at least you’ll come of it a bit wiser, and with a few new ideas :) .

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