All right. Sigh. I guess I can't put it off any longer. Check out my new web site at:
WWW.DIAMONDHOUR.COM.
Please give me an honest opinion.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Nervous Daddy...
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About Me
- Steven Barnes
- For the last thirty years or so I’ve been a lecturer, coach, novelist and television writer. For the last forty years I’ve been involved variously in the martial arts, and for all my life I’ve studied and enjoyed yoga. Not that I worked at it as hard and honestly as I should have—I’d be a combination of BKS Iyengar and Bruce Lee if I had. After publishing about three million words of science fiction (including the New York Times bestsellers The Legacy of Heorot and The Cestus Deception) and having about twenty hours of produced television shows (including The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Andromeda, and Stargate, as well as four episodes of the immortal Baywatch), I’ve got opinions on the writing life. After earning black belts in Judo and Karate, and practicing the Indonesian art of Pentjak Silat Serak for the last fifteen, well, I have some opinions there, as well. And having struggled to live consciously since childhood...well, those opinions are probably strongest of all.
The Diamond Hour
Steve's Latest!
Order Shadow Valley Today!
Read Steve's latest book Today!
Cross Your Threshold!
Discover the Threshold Training
with Steve Barnes and Scott Sonnon
12 comments:
The site is nicely done... the aesthetics are such that they create a calming atmosphere while reading IMO... well done.
The objective points:
1. The text formatting on some pages is done with hard breaks instead of letting the text flow.
2. Some more editing on the text is needed (misspellings, grammar).
3. The About Steve page is framed to be wider than the other pages.
4. The margins are closer to the background on some pages than others. The most noticeable difference is on the About Steve page.
4. On the page to sign up for the 101, there's no submit button.
The subjective points:
1. IMO, the title of each page should be proceeded with the title of the website.
2. In absence of any other content, IMO the Dar Kush link should take you directly to the blog instead of to it's own page.
3. The contact links that directly use your e-mail address should IMO link to the contact page. Cuts down on the noise to signal ratio, as it's harder for spambots to harvest your e-mail address.
Just a quick look through. Like I said, I like the layout and colors. If you need specifics, let me know.
On my screen, the fourth line of the last paragraph says "you" - and no other words. The next line then continues the sentence. I'll look at the rest of the site later, but this may be a symptom of a need for editing.
The general format looks quite good though.
Marco
Overall, a clean look. Some areas to improve:
In the home page title (what shows up in the browser header), I hate all caps "Home: LIFE COACHING" and find the "Home:" superfluous.
And more distracting, the all caps links on the left, makes it hard to read, and I think there are too many links for someone who doesn't already know you and what they want. Say they're referred to your site and they want to be coached...do they go to coaching, or Diamond hour, or is it services provided? How about rates? I think you need to think about the different kinds of people who will come looking for different things and how to lead them very easily to the page they need to go to.
Looks pretty good. Now you find out about walk-the-walk -- break a leg, dude.
It all looks pretty good to me, too. Am at work so am looking forward to exploring the site in more depth later today. Definitely interested in the 21st Century Man section.
Robert Curry
The Men's Program... would it be suitable for boys?
Suitable for teenagers. Sex will definitely be discussed. I'd say the course will be PG-13.
Looks good, but a suggestions;
It's 2010, get some video on there. You've got passion and drive and are a good speaker so get someone to film you as you talk to your audience explaining how you could help them and why you think you could help them where others have failed. Make it passionate, make it sincere, and get the energy you have inside you across. Put it on Youtube and embed it at the top of the page.
Also, testimonials. Seek out people who have gotten help from your thoughts in the past and see if they would be willing to film themselves talking about how you've helped them. It's one thing to read someone saying you've helped them, and another to see and hear them talk about it.
I recommend a little video of Be Breathed-- I've tried to work from verbal descriptions (both yours and "Let Every Breath"), but watching Sonnon's DVD made a big difference. Do people generally get good results from verbal descriptions of Be Breathed?
The site seemed fine to me. It had a nice overall feel and got your main message across. I wouldn't sweat the fine details of the site design, because I don't believe your potential clients are going to be critically examining them. They just want to know what can Steve do for me.
Just a couple small notes on the "About Steve" page- the one sentence in the first paragraph may give the impression that it is Blair who is married to Tananarive... and the "for" needs to be pulled from the "for as co-author".
"He recently won an NAACP Image Award for as co-author of the Tennyson Hardwick mystery series with actor Blair Underwood and his wife, Tananarive Due."
*There is no editing of posted comments, so delete and redo is the only way to correct my own errors in that last post.
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