But how do you want to do it? Through affiliate commission like TLA? Through contract work? Adsense? CPM ads? Direct advertising?

You need to be clear about how you want to do it – to me it looks like you are trying to build your name/services and get some contract work – and make some money on the side.

I say stick to either building your name/brand or making money through CPC/CPA/CPM ads.

Secondly, it’s not clear to me that you’re not showing full content on the blog – please add a ‘…more’ after the end of the initial description. This should hopefully increase your page views and get people reading your full content.

Logging in to comment sucks and I simply refuse to do it – unless the gain of me commenting outweighs the hassle – it never does.

Now that I’ve been a bit on the critical side – let’s look at your positive points – the overall theme is nice but a little more emphasis should be put on the content and not the theme itself (the content takes up like 25% of the blog at the moment, that’s really not enough. It should be 75%+)

The logo is friggin’ awesome – I love it and it’s something you should definitely build on it – I am not sure how but somebody out there will.

Finally let’s have a look at your SEO, yahoo says you have 600 odd back links. That’s not to shabby – I suspect that’ll greatly increase with this excellent link bait strategy you have going on with Darren. But I can’t seem to find any directory submitting that’s been done.

I know google is slamming directories recently – but it’s a really nice way of getting some easy back links. You should consider going to digital point and buying a manual directory submission (trust me, you end up paying like $2 an hr to get somebody to do the work for you).

Your URL isn’t going to score you any great keywords and neither is the description “Building a better web home”. Have a look at your google analytics or similiar tracking and have a look at what terms you are ranking for. In particular look for terms which you are ranking low for (like pages 2+, page 4+ is ideal) but getting a decent amount of traffic for. Long tail keywords are important, but you should be using your URL description to try and snag some bigger fish.

That’s all for now – Darren please create a forum for this because comments really suck. This way you can divy it up into sections like SEO/Design/Content etc and people can comment on what they like.

I am sure most of us would be happy to help others also.

Reduce header by at least two thirds. That will bring up your content.

Put what you have under the blue bar in the header

Cloud too big/hard to read

Good luck!!!

I would reduce the Tag Cloud size by quite a bit. Most of the keywords you can’t see.

Second I agree with everyone who’s said shrink the header. It’s way to large. You need to get your content and ads above the fold.

Kidding…

But really, how does the content differentiate from other alike blogs?

My only advice is to ask yourself:

What do you want to read on a daily basis? Is it going to make me skip the new episode of the Simpsons? Or is it the same stuff I can find at the PR 8 development blog?

Where is your favicon?

I would
a) condense the introduction into a tagline for the header, and move all the other stuff to an about page. Maybe “Sourcebench: a community toolbox for developers, by developers”

b) get rid of the tag cloud, and make all the tags readable.

c) work on grammar and capitalization (ie: capitalize the word “I”) cut out every unnecessary word.

e) Don’t begin so many sentences with “Sourcebench……” You can think of a more creative way to open a sentence.

f) Move the footer navigation to the side bar. I would probably not have gotten far enough down the page to see the footer if I weren’t trying to review it.

g) I’m not sure I would know that the front page posts were snippets. You may want to add a “read more” link or something under them.

As some others noted, the writing is painful: “as much people as they can”, “so what we got here” – this kind of stuff is everywhere and just turned me off.

Then the http://www.sourcebench.com/blog/ has broken stuff on it – hardly makes me confident that anything you might have to say about design is worth reading, does it?

–Too much whitespace

–Your content is way too far down (header is too large)

–Not enough quality content

–commenting requires a login (This is a massive barrier to me
as a reader. I avoid sites that do this. Try Akismet if you’re having spam problems)

–Your writing could use some work. I’m generally forgiving of middling writing when dealing with blogs; it’s an informal medium, right? But when I come across really simple grammatical mistakes, I tend to go elsewhere without a backward glance.

–In the same vein, the overall look and feel of the blog screams ‘commercial’ or almost ’spammy’. There’s no sense of community or involvement in the blogosphere. Just something hoping to grab google traffic.

–Footer navigation CAN work, but it doesn’t seem to in this case.

Here’s some other stuff that may not have been mentioned

–Your RSS feed is parsing some of the php you’re posting, or at the very least eating it. Scroll down to PHP Environment Overview while viewing your RSS Feed in Firefox 2.0. The whole paragraph of text and the first few lines of php are gone. It makes the posts look like coding errors.

–So I’m at an individual post right now… where’;s your RSS feed? There’s two more prominent links on the homepage, but on the individual page template there’s one tiny textlink that I didn’t even notice on my first pass

Hope this helps :)

2) OK, it looks like your site is aimed at developers from the front page to be a resource for them. But then there is a hire us page – is that aimed at non-developers who want to hire you to develop a site for them or for developers who need some extra help? These are going to be two very different audiences – I think you need to pick one to concentrate on.

3) If you are trying to convince people to hire you to design their sites, you might want to clean up your grammer a bit. I love the look and feel, and I hardly write in the Queen’s English myself (I’m a Texan after all), but if someone is going to hire you to develop their site, they are going to hold you to an ultra high standard.

I feel your frustration and your pain – hang in there though and best of luck!

Also, general SEO advice. Go for long tail search terms, not generic ones.

Giving away scripts is nice but there’s only a few. Even with just a few, the navigation isn’t good enough. I’d go looking elsewhere rather than trying to figure out how to navigate and search.

I hate tag clouds. I’ve never seen one that seemed useful to me.

You have some useful content it’s just hard to find. Keep adding more good content. Make it easier to read and find using some of the other suggestions and I think you’ll have a great site.

I have to agree with those who’ve said there’s too much space wasted at the top. I like to see a little bit of content when I visit a site without having to scroll down.

I also have to second those who’ve mentioned the logging-in feature with the comments. I think that tends to discourage would-be commenters from commenting.

Finally, I was a little confused about the “blog” part of your blog at first. Your posts don’t include the sort of stuff I see at most blogs (”23 comments,” “digg this,” a date stamp), and because those visual cues weren’t there, I had to wonder whether or not this was really a blog. (I realize you only post snippets on your front page, and that a lot of the “bloggy” things are on your individual post pages, but that was my first impression nonetheless.)

Thanks for allowing us to critique you, Thorsten, and best of luck with your relaunch!

I have two ideas.

First to put the post title above the actual post, then float the details in a division so the post content flows around it.

heading
details (float right)
post content

Or if you really like the left alignment with the details, make the heading/post more of an outline structure. I think that would make it a little more readable.

heading here ……………………
detail1 post content
detail2

I would just point out that the graphics look a little “clip arty” . . . Mark

If that is “clip arty,” I’d like to know where you’re getting your clip art.