Welcome to the 15th Reader Blog Critique. Last weeks critique of ToMuse.com generated some discussion but most of it was regarding the themes feedburner feedcount image!
This weeks review is on Techie Buzz, a blog which covers technology, software and more. Here are the questions the owner Keith would like to ask you all about the blog :
- What are your thoughts of the design on the blog?
- Do you think there are too many advertisements on the blog?
- What are your thoughts about the quality of the content?
- Are there adequate and sufficient options for readers to share the content with their friends?
- Any suggestions on other areas the blog would require to improve on?
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 
Keith 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 : Techie Buzz
First – The Featured Section occupies most of the space when home page is opened – i think it should decrease a bit in terms of its vertical height.
Second – at the footer the extreme bottom right is empty – it is the space which falls jsut below the sidebar.
Rest is all cool according to me i am a regular visitor of techie-buzz.com – must say keith puts amazing content here, i visit the site daily
These are all the feedback I have as a reader, thanks
Hi,
1. Design – cool, clean, professional, no problem with that.
2. pa-id posts can be easily identified, but even they are not stuffed. Its ok. The ads at footer from burstnet are not at all irritative. They don't annoy me anyway, but hacknmod one is…
3. Good, its well developed and reflects hold of Keith on tech. Of course, he collects good information and shares and not to forget he himself make research posts which will be useful. Most thankful for him for that great upgrade plugin.
4. Yeah, there are good number of options
5. I don't find any meaning in making internal links nofollow type – on home page, featured post links and footer links are nofollow
. I don't think ajax based tag cloud will improve his traffic anyway. Add "advertisements" above adsense, though his name seperates, the title may misguide visitors. Better to make the comment form a small one, it just becomes lengthy to fill in all items, may be he should consider reducing the spaces or using spam protection aside to submit button …
Totally, its a good blog and I love reading it
And another important thing, the email popup feature on post pages need to be fixed… its not clear on my ff2.0
@abhishek and @Pavan thanks for the extensive feedback for the blog, I will surely implement your suggestions into the site.
Looking forward to more comments from Blogging Tips readers
Well to me it seems great. Really, Nice one. I really appreciate your efforts. Great blog
New one for me fresh impressions.
Nice and clean core design. Boring content, featured posts go like – shopping, weird utility, firefox, firefox, orkut, windows 7 calculator. Hardly a killer content for my taste.
Answering questions
1. Theme is clean but they way it is used is rather bloated.
2. Amount is fine, advertisement content is not. Mostly totally irrelevant to tech and ugly stuff.
3. I feel it's not enough general purpose content. Posts target sub-groups of users like firefox, google talk… indian tv? Personally I won't subscribe to site knowing that most of content is not about something I use or interested in.
4. Seems fine. My opinion is that people that use sharing stuff on their own use native tools and rest don't care.
5. Clutter, general-purpose content, relevant advertising.
General notes
6. Close to valid code, only problem with one 3rd party something http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://techie-b…
7. Home page is relatively heavy at 1.2Mb.
8. 44 scripts?? I think that's a record or close to it in Reader Blog Critique. Content is loaded but site just continues to load ton of… something in background.
between 8 and 9 (lazy to change ton of numbers). Good 404 page.
Static pages
9. Top posts is five pages long. Translates to reader as "whatever posts that received even tiny attention".
10. About page starts fine but turns out pretty long. I prefer short and clear ones. Photo with huge dark glasses may be not perfect for creating personal connection feeling. Weekipedia quote could use quote markup.
11. Ask us should be called Contact – people look for established terms. I don't like contact form (in general, but this one especially). Too much required (what if I don't want to input email or subject?), unexplained CC option. There is also actually separate contact page by link from About. And about has ton of contact-related stuff not listed on Contact or Ask Pages.
12. "Browsing Archives Tagged 'Tips And Tricks'" archives tagged?.. btw I don't see full archives page.
Index
13. Fine, I only don't like Continue Reading buttons. Looks disconnected from post and kinda hard to notice.
14. I don't like huge blocks with recent stuff under index. Too much of everything.
Single post
15. Don't like ads stuck in text much.
16. Tags suck. Why have six tags that all say "youtube-something" when one tag that says "youtube" will do? Overusing tags destroys them as navigation tool.
17. I get huge empty area above Related.
Sidebar
18. Fourteen blocks of stuff. Four of them are tabbed and require extra click to access. How many readers would bother browsing through all of this?
19. I don't like tag cloud. Flashy but hardly usable.
20. Bad use of bolding. Bolding is good to highlight phrases/key parts in text, not whole lines.
Footer
21. Oh, plenty of stuff that I expected to find in top navigation.
22. RSS link uses weird wording.
23. Comments RSS link uses unneeded feed protocol prefix.
24. CSS validation link is not needed (especially if site doesn't validate).
25. Inconsistent underline on bottom links.
26. I was slightly surprised to see Blog Design Studio credit, it doesn't look like their work much. From their portfolio it seem they only did few secondary areas, not whole theme.
Overall
It's a blog with two years of history, good traffic and plenty of subscribers. In my opinion problem here is it's not distinguished from blog one month old without any of that. Good but somewhat generic theme+basic logo+clutter+feature overload+lots of irrelevant advertising. Is this a formula of established and succesful blog?
I think you've probably reached level when you can invest in custom theme and interface design, as well as pick your advertisers instead of using ton of them.
@Rarst Thanks for the constructive feedback, I will definitely try and improve on areas you have pointed out.