Remarkablogger

This post is the second in a series of 5 free quick blog reviews worth a total of $500 that I’m giving away to promote my blog consultancy. First review: Caroline Middlebrook, Livin Online.

DCS Media

First impressions

Jonathan Danylko runs DCS Media, a blog on technology and business. My first impression: serious and business-like. Not enough graphical interest. There’s nothing wrong with the color scheme and the design is solid, but I’d like to see more pictures or category-based graphics. It’s a very text-heavy visual first impression.

I like that there’s a picture, but not that picture. The mysterious hand on the head is distracting. It only takes a few minutes to have someone shoot a decent portrait, crop and edit in Picasa or even MS Office Picture Manager, and get it on the blog.

I’m not a huge fan of the logo. It seems a bit generic and doesn’t communicate anything associative. It doesn’t evoke anything for me. You can get great logos for reasonable prices nowadays.

Content and purpose

Coming at this with no prior knowledge or associations, at first glance I have no idea what DCS stands for or what media is being referred to. The blog seems to be about somewhat advanced technological topics related to business. I think a more suitable name could be found, but by this point the blog is well-established. URL changes are risky, but the name of the blog doesn’t have to equal the URL.

This is a business blog if there ever was one: the business served by the blog is Danylko Consulting Services, the DCS in DCS Media. Jonathan does a too good of a job of letting the blog stand on its own and doesn’t reveal the consultancy enough. You have no idea there’s a business behind DCS Media until you check out the About page (which is very well done, by the way!).

Jonathan does a great job providing well-written advice on a small number of core categories. My first impression, however, was that the content was too technical for the average small business owner. Maybe that’s not the audience Jonathan is trying to reach, but based on the blog’s tagline, that’s who I thought the intended audience was.

In the About page, he says he is writing to:

…help small businesses on a shoestring budget to make the most from technology while focusing on the latest Internet trends and personal aspect of how your business should perform.

This makes me think: general business owner audience. But then he says:

I’ve been constantly updating the site to make DCS Media an excellent source for programmers, designers, entrepreneurs, Micro-ISV’s, and small business owners as well as people who follow Internet/Intranet trends.

From what I can see, that’s much more accurate description of what’s on the blog. The only problem is that’s a lot of very different groups of people to be writing for. A person from any one group could find the blog on a day when the home page is full of articles about another group and and leave, thinking the blog offers nothing for them. Most programmers do not want to read the same kinds of things as a busness owner. Kudos to Jonathan for being able to write for all these groups and for being that rare kind of internet Renaissance man, but I think the blog needs to be more specific about who it’s for.

Micro-ISVs are hot, and are going to get hotter. It’s got buzzword potential (that means buy domain names now, rather than later). It seems to me that this is Jonathan’s real audience by covering all these topics, except people like himself may not be likely to need his consulting services!

Now, let me pull back for a moment and bring in the consulting website: it looks a little forlorn! There are no testimonials (or at least there is no link to them). The home page is so bare it looks a little unfinished. The standard business-y picture of glass buildings isn’t helping. That is so generic! The reason why I mention it has to do with what I would recommend for Jonathan.

Recommendations

• Either create multiple blogs or focus more tightly on a single target profile for your audience.
• Consider combining the consulting pages into the blog so that they each reinforce the other better. You want customers. Your customers want a consultant who knows what he’s doing. Combining forces between blog and main website may help everybody.
• Change the author picture.There shouldn’t be anybody else in the picture.
• Add more graphical interest: more pictures in posts.
• Consider a new logo
• Write more posts that allow the consulting business to connect with readers (see my 10 types of business blog posts).

Jonathan, I hope you found this quick review helpful. Float some of these ideas by any other blogging-savvy contacts and see what they say.

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