Kristi Hines said
8 months, 1 week ago: Thanks @arodomus for submitting your blog http://nyctalking.com/ for review on SME. I hope you find my various notes helpful!
Design Notes
The design is nice for a magazine-style blog. I think the only thing that is missing (or I just missed it) is a contact link near the top next to the About Us and Our Staff. While both of those pages have a comment form, some people may want to contact you privately without fear of having their comments published. This can help especially if you want people to contact you about writing for the site, advertising, etc.
Speaking of the About Us page, maybe add some social profiles to those bios so people can connect with everyone on your staff on their preferred networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.).
Social Notes
I see you’re using the official Twitter follow button which is great – visitors don’t have to leave your site to follow you on Twitter. You can replace the Add Me button in the sidebar with the Google+ badge (https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/badge/) to do the same with that network as well. Also be sure to add a link to NYC Talking to your Google+ profile to help claim authorship so your photo shows up next to posts in Google search.
As far as the like boxes for Facebook, you might want to consider cutting down the height on those to put them in one section on the sidebar. Then you can move your subscribe box over to the right where more people will notice it. Maybe consider moving the recent comments over to the left to balance the sidebars out.
Also, not sure which plugin you are using for your social share buttons at the bottom of posts, but see if it can use the official Twitter retweet button instead (https://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons#tweet) and configure it to include your username in the tweet and recommend your Twitter profile to anyone who tweets a post (like the button in your Digg Digg plugin). Also consider adding a Facebook like button in the share options so people can do a one-click share to Facebook.
SEO Notes
Definitely use the Yoast SEO plugin to add a meta description for your home page. This is a customized sentence of two under 165 characters that describes your website and shows up in search results. Currently, your blog looks like this in search.
By adding a custom description, you can write something that will make more people want to click through to your blog. This also goes for your blog’s posts and pages too!
Also, I noticed you have some links in the footer of your blog. Not sure if these are advertisers or if it was something embedded in the theme – if they’re just embedded with them theme, you might want to see if you can remove them.
Content Notes
You seem to have lots of variety in your topics and they are well organized in the nav bar which is great. You might want to consider adding a guest post guidelines if you are looking to expand your list of contributors and have it under the Guest Post heading.
Notes from the Audience
Now I invite everyone here on the SME forums to add your suggestions (or feel free to agree / disagree with mine). Please add constructive feedback and suggestions. This series is to help people improve their blogs, not to have their blogs roasted Comedy Central style.
