After committing to get back to blogging and seven straight weeks of a weekly blog post I thought I was hitting my stride. Last week’s blog post didn’t pan out quite as well as planned. This week I dissect what went wrong in last week’s post.
The post title
The first big mistake I made was the post title, I was trying to be clever and thought “There is no grid” sounded cool because it was like the “There is no spoon” line from the film the Matrix. Unfortunately this just ended up as a click-bait sensationalist title.
Not my intention at all, but I completely should have seen this before I released the post. The title didn’t reflect the point of the post either, in fact it sat entirely at odds with it.
This immediately got a negative response from a number of readers. Big mistake!
Incoherency
The post was littered with incoherent and poorly executed points of view. I either contradicted myself or vaguely clung to a loose argument the whole way through. This confused quite a few people. To me it made sense, but I knew what I was trying to say and I was blind to this when I edited, re-read and edited the post before going live.
Misleading blockquotes
I chose some misleading parts of the copy for the stand out quotes in the page. This didn’t help the incoherency issues above.
Learning from my mistakes
I made a real mess of last week’s post. Luckily most readers got past the silly title, the brash quotes and generally poor coherence to the real point of the blog post: Think about what you are designing – you don’t have to start with a grid.
Handling feedback
This was the first post I’ve written where I got some really heated debate including what felt like an overwhelming amount of negative feedback. It was all due to my poorly written post and mainly from the sensationalist post title.
Never having had this surge of feedback before with many negative comments, I had three choices on how to respond:
- Ignore it
- Answer every comment (negative and positive) as best I could
- Become incredibly defensive and possibly not very polite
I went for option 2, it was important that I conveyed the actual point of the post. But I shouldn’t have had to do that, the original post should have made that obvious.
Stats
I collected a few pieces of data from last week’s post.
Comments across Twitter, the post comments and comments on Designer News
Positive: 82%
Negative: 18%
New blog newsletter subscribers
Up by 17%
New Twitter followers
15
New Snapchat followers
5
Google Analytics
Over a 7 day period before the post: 585 visitors
Over a 7 day period on and after the post: 8,196 visitors
Bounce rate down 10% in on and after the post stats.
Stats Analysis
The above stats are interesting for me, as the negative comments really did feel like they were coming thicker and faster than the positive ones. They didn’t taste good, that’s for sure. What is interesting is that even though I did so many things wrong, something hit a positive chord with the audience. It was the most shared and visited post I’ve ever written. I’m a bit perplexed by this.
I was really lucky that many readers were able to read between the lines and work out what I was trying to say.
In Summary
I feel like I did myself a disservice last week, if I had done things differently then I may have got a better level of engagement and less negative vibes.
I need to remember the following when writing a post:
- Make sure I choose a suitable title.
- Make sure I write something valuable.
- Make sure what I write is well structured and coherent.
- Don’t sensationalise things (even accidentally).
- Always sum up my points with a final summary paragraph.
- Keep it simple, don’t try to be clever.
- I want something to be shared because it is “useful” not “stupid” or “tripe” or the wrong kind of “funny”.
- Finally, get someone else to read the post before I hit the publish button (this is why this post is slightly later out than usual as I had to wait to make sure the above points were covered).
It is still early days and I’m still finding my stride it seems, but it’s been an interesting journey so far. Thank you to everyone who has been following along and commenting, positively and negatively.
In next week’s post
Next week, I’m going back to my routes – I’ll be documenting my personal WordPress Cheatsheet packed full of useful functions and snippets of code that will hopefully speed up your workflow and reduce your googling.
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theGreatMachine Jun 18, 2016 at 3:09 am
I love your blog. You’re one of the most sincere honest people on the internet and truly care about what you do. This follow up is perfect. I personally use my own grid system. If it looks good, feels good, clicks good, its all good!
Chris Wharton Jun 18, 2016 at 7:28 am
What a lovely comment, thank you so much for that :)
Richard Jun 22, 2016 at 12:51 pm
I’ve not read the negative comments made in response to your blog post, but the post itself was perfectly clear, so there’s no reason for you to appolgise to anyone.
The points you made were valid, interesting and valuable, and you should be free and able to make them without fear from those who may have differing opinions.
Chris Wharton Jun 22, 2016 at 12:54 pm
Hi Richard, Thanks so much for the lovely and kind words. However, this post isn’t an apology post, it is a “I could have done better” post and should have made it clearer. If you read the negative comments you’ll see there is a common theme running through all of them and it’s due to the points I’ve raised in this post.