Review: We Dreaming

Overview

I received the initial request to review www.wedreaming.com on August 5th, but circumstances did not allow me to dedicate the time until now that a review deserves. Having said that I did get some extra time to really look into the site and hopefully get a better understanding of where it (the site) is coming from.

One of the first things I do is check out the “about” section of any blog I am visiting regardless of if it is for a review or simply for personal gratification. This was no different, and as you can see for yourself the operator(s) of this site tell us very plainly what the purpose is of this blog - we believe that remembering, interpreting, and expressing our dreams in this public forum will help to give us a better understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live.

Now that we’ve got the introductions out of the way let’s dig into the site a little bit and see what we can find hidden beneath the exterior.

The Good

Like always I will start out with the “good” stuff first, but before I get going with it I just want to explain why the “good” stuff is always dwarfed by the “bad” stuff in my reviews. Simply because people who request these reviews are after an honest opinion, not someone to mealy-mouth them and jerk them around. I find the best way to give an honest opinion is to just tell the truth instead of trying to sugar coat my opinions. I just had to bring that up because someone asked me why I was so negative all the time.

Anyhow onto the good! First and foremost I love this concept. A community driven effort to collect, review, and interpret dreams is truly a niche market. I would even take it a step further and either focus on one type of dream (eg, flying) or would make several sub-categories of dreams common to most people. In other words either pinpoint target one subject, or compartmentalize and target multiple subjects.

I like the fact that multiple personalities are writing the dreams. It gives the site more depth. For instance Wadeone dreams and expresses them far differently than Mystielily who is different than… you get the idea. While I won’t list each and every contributing author to this blog I will say that you should really dig into the archives a little bit and see what might be lurking around in there. If you don’t you might miss something that you find speaks to you on a personal level.

The site is very clean and simple which appeals to me. There isn’t an over abundance of graphics or “tricky” CSS to make things work. It’s is a simple layout that works quite well. I for one could take a lesson from We Dreaming regarding this matter. I’m also a little jealous of how well targeted the Google Adsense ads seem to be each time I refresh the page.

The Bad

Now we get into my favorite part of this entire endeavor. Ok, maybe it’s not my “favorite” part, but I do enjoy it because this is when I believe I can potentially help someone out even if only to plant a seed in their head. Remember these are simply my opinions of the topic at hand, in this case We Dreaming, so do not think I am telling you how to make more money, or get more traffic, or anything else of that nature. I am simply telling everyone what appeals to me and what does not and hopefully providing some insight into possible improvements.

The Concern: Default Wordpress URL - This is actually something I see quite a bit. Currently the direct articles look something like this http://wedreaming.com/?p=xxx where “xxx” is a string of numbers representing the article. Get into your wordpress control panel and change that to actual words. Go to options->permalinks->custom, specify below->/%postname% This will make the link the same as the post title. If I title my post “Humpty dumpty was an idiot” the link will be www.blah.com/humpty-dumpty-was-an-idiot. Much easier to remember and though I’m not 100% certain I would imagine it would help out with search engines.

The Concern: SEO, or rather lack thereof - I’ll simply say this, when I go to blogsearch.google.com and type in dream interpretation, or dreams We Dreaming does not show up! At least not within the first 100 results for either query. I am by no means a SEO expert, but I am convinced that a little work is in order to try and shore up your search engine positioning especially when search very specific keywords (dreams/dream interpretation) and in a very specific location (blogs). Do a Google search for an application called All in one SEO which will make life much easier when it comes to setting up your blogs SEO. If you already use this plugin then make use of it in a more robust way for every post.

The Concern: Lack of updates - I mentioned earlier that I had received the original request for a review on 8/5/07. Today is 8/17/07 and in that time there was only one update done on 8/16/07. The prior post was on 8/3/07 (I just received the request on 8/5/07) and the one prior to that was on 7/17/07 and prior to that 7/10/07. That is simply to long to wait to post. Even if you can’t post dreams post something to do with dreams. Post a book review, or post some commonly interpreted dream symbols. Ask readers to submit dreams and you can interpret them. Whatever just make sure you stay active on the blog and that your readers know you’re active. Even if not every single day you need to be “down in the trenches” a few times a week interacting. If not then why bother having a blog? Why not just use a static web page and simply upload the updates via FTP? I don’t mean to nag, but I can’t stress the importance of updating enough. My own experience bears this out as over the past 2 weeks I’ve not posted much to my own blog. I went from 22 RSS subscribers down to 9 at last update and from about 350 unique page views per day down to about 50. Update, update, update!!!

The Concern: Writing style - Let’s just say I’m not exactly enthralled by the writing in general when it comes to the dreams themselves. They read very much like “todo lists” in paragraph format. Here’s a paragraph from the article titled Helicopter Journey to the Amphibian-Machine Queen.

This dream started out with me in some sort of fighter plane squadron. We were being attacked by other jets. Then it changed and I was in the tail gunner position on a huge military transport helicopter. From the position I was in, I had a bird’s eye view of the copter I was in and also of the one in front of us. These copters were a dull military green in color and each on carried a group of about twenty soldiers.

First of all the title while no doubt descriptive to the dreamer means less than nothing to the casual reader. A title should give us an idea of what we are gearing up to read. I understand what a helicopter journey is, but I’m totally lost about what an “Amphibian-Machine Queen” might be. If the title is what fits then it is what fits, but for those of us who are left to ponder you should immediately address the “Amphibian-Machine Queen” so we can feel like we have a clue.

As to the writing itself. As mentioned before it reads like a todo list. I don’t mean it’s like a list, but that it has that same mechanical cadence. An artificial tone. Liven it up! Instead of writing the dreams like some kind of dry and boring scientific report turn them into stories. Embellish a little bit. Remember these are dreams and no one expects you to remember every detail exactly as it happened so have some fun with it. In the above paragraph I cited I would do something like this with just the first two sentence as an example -

The last thing I remember was hurling through the air at supersonic speeds, my wingman off my starboard side keeping pace with me like a guardian angel. I tried training my eyes to his tail, on the squadron emblem, but it just became to much for me and I must have passed out because the next thing I know I’m sitting here in the gunners seat in the tail of this monstrous helicopter…

That’s not a perfect example by any means, but you get the idea. What makes dreams interesting and exciting is the imagery. In order for someone who has never had that dream to become interested you have to create the imagery and the sensations for them. Many blogs can do very well without a very strong dose of creative writing, but a blog about dreams needs it like a fish needs water.

The Concern: Using Digg - I don’t have an issue with using digg on your site (I use it on mine), but it doesn’t really fit. Digg is mainly for news sites. If anything you should use Stumble Upon as the stand-alone, though with the Share This plugin you are using that’s not really necessary either.

The Concern: The forums - An empty forum is kind of like a blog that gets no comments. It makes people leave. I don’t know the psychology behind this, but it tends to have that effect on people. Give some thought to how you can handle the forums. I would keep them, but get rid of the link until you build up a community. Once you have 200 or so RSS subscribers then I would reopen them to the public.

The Concern: No RSS feed - This is probably one of the biggest issues I see with your blog. There is no RSS feed. Rather there is no evident way to subscribe to the feed. A RSS feed is essential to a blog’s growth and maturity. Run, do not walk, run to Feed Burner and get yourself setup with a RSS feed if you do not have one already. If you do then get some links up there!

The Concern: Ads, comments, and ratings in inappropriate places - There is really no need to have google ads, comments sections, and Digg/sharethis ratings on things like the “Contact Us”, “About”, or “Sitemap” areas of the blog. Try to keep the ads, comments, and ratings to the content (posts).

The Conclusion

Overall I like this blog. I think it is relatively original and certainly a niche market. I don’t know how big that market is or even what the potential for earning is, but then I don’t get the feeling that is the main purpose of We Dreaming.

As I pointed out there are some areas that I believe can use some work. If I had to pick just one area to work on it would be the writing style. Only for the fact that in order to gain a following you need to be entertaining, and currently the writing (on all of the blog entries by all of the different authors I read by the way) is very formal, very “report like”.

That wraps up another review. Please take some time and pay a visit to www.wedreaming.com and take a look around. As always it has been fun.

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