Welcome to the 5th Reader Blog Critique. Once again, last weeks critique was a success so thanks to everyone who reviewed Let’s Sermo.
This weeks critque is Balkhis, a blog which covers a lot of topics including making money online, search engine optimisation, web design, WordPress and more.
I spoke to the the owner, Syed Balkhi, about what he thinks he needs to address on the blog. Here’s what he had to say :
- Regarding the blog content, which categories do you prefer?
- What do you think about the new design to the site, is it user-friendly enough?
- Should I add more video or text tutorials?
In addition I welcome commenters to talk about the blogs content and design and any suggestions you have for promoting the blog.
The most helpful and constructive commenter will get $10. Alternatively, if you prefer, I can register a domain for you at eNom and push it to your account 
Syed will decide who the best commenter was.
As usual, I remind everyone that positive or negative, all feedback should be constructive.
If you have any questions about any of this please let me know in this thread
Blog to be Reviewed : Balkhis
Linda P. Morton | September 24th, 2008 at 12:10 pm #
The blog looks good, but I do have a couple of concerns:
I know that dark backgrounds are popular now, but they don’t help readability. Readability is further decreased when a font of the same color but different shade is used over the dark background.
The text in the white box is much easier to read, but the box is so small. How much text can go in it? Or do readers have to scroll the box to read the text. Readers don’t like to scroll particularly in a small box.
Syed Balkhi | September 24th, 2008 at 5:06 pm #
Head over to the site and you will know. It is a magazine style theme. So what you see in the screen shot is the homepage.
SE7EN | September 25th, 2008 at 3:01 am #
Wow I’m really impressed with the new design. I read feed from my email and don’t know that the blog was redesigned.
- Displaying latest post from each category is great.
but when I looked in detail, I find its readability issue too.
I don’t want to read the text block. Don’t know why.
maybe because the font is small, and excerpt doesn’t properly format (in latest post on white box too) or the space between each line is too small
I just read the title and click
- My fav categories
Case Study
Freebies
Pimp my Blog
Web Designs Resources
WP Themes
- text tutorials please.
Chetan | September 25th, 2008 at 9:35 am #
Syed, i am a regular reader and commentator to the blog and love all the topics being written there..
You are good at wordpress and web designing which is shown with the blog design itself, so why not stress with tutorials or video tutorials of web designing etc. more than the other things?
Pimp my blog is another great idea
The new design is pretty cool, and seriously has fastened the loading speed of the blog. But a small suggestion would be to use a bit more of white color than the entirely bluish background.
Anyways love everything in your blog!
Desk Coder | September 25th, 2008 at 10:43 am #
When you highlight over “Advertise on Balkhis”, the yellow on white background is not the best. And, you don’t know it is a link, you may want to add a link below your 125×125 images that says Advertise (or whatever).
Pages are a little slow, and the only reason I can tell is because it seems the images are the last to load.
Yellow text and white text under categories on homepage do not look like links.
These are just me being picky:
The list image you use makes me think I am in a tree view, and if I click the link, it will drop down and show me more links. It also makes me want to click the image, which isn’t clickable.
Move the Top Commentators or Recent Readers to the bottom, and move your profiles to the sidebar.
After your pages, it says “Page 1 of 0″
Other than that, very cool design. I haven’t read enough of your blog yet to comment on that, but I have subscribed.
Rarst | September 25th, 2008 at 4:37 pm #
I am not really commited reader of subject blog but I am subscribed for short time and had commented on few posts. So in this case my opinion of site was formed previously and I have very few things that I found deliberately for critique.
Blog gives very professional first impression. Theme is unique and confident. But scrolling down I really dislike white text on blue background. It’s kinda hard to focus on and in some places my ClearType settings make it look blurred.
Also overall layout seems too spaced out. Post area is thin and sidebar looks lost in all that space without borders to shape it.
Site is fast loading overall but I noticed that one of the banners weights insane 200+Kb and is 150×150 scaled down to 125×125.
About page suddenly has more content than I was looking for. It’s totally not scannable. Same (on smaller scale) in footer.
Portfolio sends to another site without any way to determine that before clicking.
Page number showing on static pages as mentioned above. Also it could use rounded corners - all other elements of theme do.
Peel corner ad fits really well with interesting content to highlight. But it has downside of creating expectation on peel-like design elements used elsewhere - like star on featured post or number of comments. After taking a look at peel I dragged my cursor to that star and waited and waited… And nothing happened.
“(c) Copyright” in footer is like saying “Copyright Copyright”. Only one of them is needed and enough. Validating links are totally unneeded especially with negative text accompanying them.
I get blank page on 404.
Sitemap we had previously discussed in comments, so I won’t repeat that.
Farrhad | September 29th, 2008 at 8:29 am #
Point by point
Page loaded quickly and works well in IE, Safari, Firefox and Chrome.
RSS icon is really common. I feel it must stand out.
The logo is pretty cool so is the favicon.
Readability is alright.
The peel off ad however is very irritating. Rest of the banners are placed well.
You do not need bookmark icons on the contact page.
The search box is pretty nice.
The blog itself is pretty cool. I dont see any serious concerns.
Keep it up
Farrhad | September 29th, 2008 at 8:30 am #
In addition:
“Probably not w3c Valid” looks really unprofessional.
Also i enjoyed the content