Reader Blog Critique : Tomuse.com
Welcome to the 14th Reader Blog Critique. Last weeks critique of Linkersblog.com had some great replies so I’m sure this weeks critique will generate some great feedback too.
This weeks review is on ToMuse, a blog which covers new technology, business start-ups, Web 2.0, websites, gadgets, web tools, open source software, computers, electronics, and various other random things. .
Here are the questions the owner Kevin would like to ask you all about the blog :
- What do you like and dislike about the site?
- What do you think can be done to improve it?
- Do post/pages load quickly for you?
- Does the navigation and categories make sense?
- How do you feel about the number and placement of ads?
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 
Kevin 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 : ToMuse
Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes ClubPosted on November 25th, 2008 and filed under Reader Blog Critique
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20 Responses to “Reader Blog Critique : Tomuse.com”
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[...] to the 15th Reader Blog Critique. Last weeks critique of ToMuse.com generated some discussion but most of it was regarding the themes feedburner [...]
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well, what can I say. The site is temporarily unavailable. I think there is no bigger problem than that. Maybe it is a server side of thing and I think Tomuse needs to start planning for moving out. *Cheers*
Thanks for bringing that to my attention athlon24, not sure what happened there but it’s working now.
Ah Ha! I found out why the site was unavailable….my host picked today, of all days, to establish the new server! Go figure.
To the Kevin of BloggingTips and not of Tomuse…pls close this post. The FeedCount is fake. Feedcount image url is : http://tomuse.com/wp-content/themes/Vestique/images/feedsburn.gif and FeedCount is disabled for the actual feed at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~fc/ToMuseBlog?bg=00A2FF&fg=444444&anim=0 – This will say feed count disabled.
And for a blog who has only 12 pages of posts and alexa traffic not even under 100,000 … its impossible to has 30000 approx RSS Subscribers! I even don’t have 200 even with less than 100,000 alexa traffic.
I won’t review his blog and pls Kevin, don’t waste your $10 over a blog which is cheating its visitors.
In Reply to Navjot Singh:
It’s called a theme and I’m actually trying it on for size. I thought this would be be a good place to get feedback on it.
You have such a warm heart
Should I review you blog now with such harshness? I think not. Thanks for the CONSTRUCTIVE criticism.
One thing seems apparent, I should remove the default subscriber count if I intend to use this theme.
Thanks again Navjot, love your avatar
I removed the default feed button. Please let me know if you see any other problems with this theme. Thanks!
I was not harsh…but I hate when people can come up with staggering feed counts on new blogs. That’s why I may have sounded rude. Thanks for removing the feed image.
Navjot:
Thanks for your constructive criticism. I “hate” it when people jump to conclusions but then again, I remind myself that I am not perfect either and then I am humbled by my own thoughts and words.
Any other problems with my theme?
Ok, got to it at last. New blog for me, fresh impressions.
First impression – and content is where?..
Second impression – oh, content is that tiny thing between the ads!
Answering questions
1. It has too many stuff going on at the same time. Impression of a mess where you don’t really see what is good and what is bad.
2. Sit with pencil and draw meaningful layout.
3. Page itself is reasonable but amount of script (31 script, 400+Kb) is not.
4. No. Categories block in sidebar is to dependent on script, at first I thought it was non-functional demo. Took it some time to start working.
Tags are overused, there is no system to them and too many similar ones. Recent post has three different variations with g1 for example.
Comparing to original theme header and footer areas that are supposed to help with navigation are changed to advertisement instead.
5. It’s insane. I counted eleven huge ad blocks on home page. On post pages more reasonable but still ad-heavy.
General notes
6. Doesn’t validate. And it’s not like usual few things missing, it’s like over three hundred errors. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://tomuse.com/
7. Scripts. It took few minutes for browser to finish digesting scripts and actually start working as intended.
8. It kinda has two taglines and secondary actually sounds more meaningful.
Static page
9. Submit news seems useless.
10. WordPress page is about premium plugins, why isn’t it called premium plugins?
11. Can’t imagine anyone using ton of those search forms.
12. Lifestream on about page mostly shows same link spammed to every possible social service.
Index
13. Too many ads, tags and subscribe links. Area for actual excerpts is tiny and they are auto-generated which doesn’t help visibility at all.
Single post page
14. Too many of social/subscribe stuff again. Register for comment? I wonder if anyone bothers.
15. Posts have plenty of graphics but close to none sub-headings and text formating.
Sidebar
16. Google search says Google twice.
17. Tag cloud is overkill and unusable.
18. I mentioned that categories block is too complex and slow-working.
Footer
19. Bottom line would look better centered.
20. It says 2006-2008 but blog was only started in 2008?
Overall
It looks like blog strives to have everything. Hundreds of social links to be social, hundreds of subscribe links to get tons of subscribers, dozens of ads to make pile of money.
So do you get enourmous amount of traffic, subscribers and money from this? If not I think it’s time to look for things that work and cut things that don’t.
woops forgot 2 other things
archives I noticed
No follow them! and secondly consider moving from allinoneseo to platinum seo as allinone is no longer supported while platinum is,
I think that ads in between the posts gotta go or need to be smaller than that. Site loads fine for me, but I am on a fast internet connection. I personally am not a fan of displaying the tags that I used in a post because they take extra space. I would remove that if I were you. I would also work on writing custom excerpts.
seems like askimet caught my longer comment…posted in the forum thread though
@Donace
Kick Kevin (BloggingTips one) in email, Akismet here kills long comments all the time lately.
btw I heard AllInOneSEO is still supported, changed developer or something like that. Last update was in end of October.
My humble opinions below… I’m writing before reading other comments so some things may be repeated… and I’m no expert.
Likes:
~Colors… good contrast, easy to read
~variety of posts, screen shots, and videos, seems original and well thought out
~pages load quick
~Categories on sidebar
Dislikes:
~too busy… where is the content?
~header is sparse and hard to
~gaps between posts, feels like something is missing or didn’t load
~too many ’subscription’ links, it’s overload
~difficult to determine the purpose of this blog
Keep at it! It’s a great start!
Rarst:
Thanks so much for all the great recommendations and detail! So many things to address. I am very appreciative.
Syed:
Thank you, I will remove the tags display and rethink the ads.
Donace:
I caught your review in the forum, thanks!
The Geek:
I will address the gaps, remove the tags display on homepage and archives (gets rid of subscription links too). Thank you for the encouragement as well!
Thanks for the likes, its nice to hear what works too
I would like to say thanks to everyone for the helpful suggestions. I am already updating the site based on your remarks.
While there were several participants that provided excellent reviews, I found Rarst’s to be he most thorough and detailed and therefore he is the winner.
Donace’s review was a close second and because it was such a great effort I would like to give him a brand spanking new plugin that we just developed called Widget Locationizer. It gives you total control over your widgets by letting you assign post/page IDs, tags, and categories for which it will appear. It essentially makes your widgets smarter permitting better ad targeting. You can find it here if you’re interested: http://tomuse.com/wordpress/widget-locationizer
Thanks again everyone!
@Kevin
Thanks and good luck with improving your blog!
sweet I was actually considering the possible uses of that plugin as well :p
Donace:
I can’t contact you via your contact form at The Nexus. The captcha isn’t displaying. Can you contact me via my contact form at ToMuse or PM at the Blogging Tips forum? I can then give you download access to the plugin.