Welcome to the 19th Reader Blog Critique. This weeks review is on TechZoomIn, a blog which gives technology and blogging tips.
Here are a few issues the owner Lax would like to ask you all :
- What do you like first about TechZoomIn?
- What areas can it improve?
- Anything about positives and negatives at this blog?
- How about the content quality?
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 
Lax 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 : TechZoomIn
The design, honestly, is PATHETIC! It is a very common free theme.
I am bugged of seeing this theme.
Either, get a rocking free theme and tweak it or get a good premium theme (I did that and tweaked it).
I liked reading some of the posts
@Farrhad,
Thanks for your feedback.
Am looking at the theme change.But looking for some free time in the new year,so that i can do
The first thing I noticed was the highly annoying snow falling. It's very distracting and gives the blog a really amateur feel. It also caused the CPU usage of Safari to spike massively to the point where I had to exit the site, surely not the desired effect. There also appears to be a layout quirk in the "Recent Comments" section of the sidebar, obscuring some of the text. I also agree with Farrhad in that the theme is bland and generic.
I tried searching your blog for the word "Chrome", having seen that you had posted content about Google's browser. Unfortunately the results returned (http://www.techzoomin.com/?s=chrome) seemed, on the face of it at least, to be poorly matched to the search term.
I think you're in a very crowded market, content wise. There are thousands of blogs covering broadly the same subjects as you. At this moment in time your blog just doesn't stand out enough (on all fronts, content, design, logo and branding). To make matters worse, I found many of your articles difficult to read because of the poor English used. In some cases it was simply grammatical (your instead of you're for example) but in other is was simply the wrong words being used ("on" instead of "in"). I understand that not everyone has perfect English (I certainly don't claim to), but in such a crowded market place it's enough to push me on to a rival blog that's simply better written.
I like your use of feature content, and that's something that could push your blog to the next level, but I think some better "sneeze" pages would help. If it were me, I'd focus more on this feature content than the shorter quick posts that sporadically show up on your archives.
Good luck.
I am no alien to Techzoomin, actually I am one of the subscribers of its RSS feed
Coming straight to the review of the site,
1. What I like about TechZoomin -
The content. Especially the ones on WordPress. Some of the posts on WordPress themes collections are amazing and exhaustive.
2. Areas to improve -
Honestly, a lot to improve in terms of website design & posting frequency. I am sure Lax knows it better, being involved in analysing the best WordPress themes, he knows what he must do.
3. Positives –
Keep up the good work. You know a lot on how to market a blog, number of subscribers is a proof for that.
Negatives-
Obviously the design. Having the post excerpt for all the posts on homepage is not a wise idea. Take care of widgets on sidebar, they are very important parts of any website, make sure they are proper.
4. Content quality-
This is something which is already good but you can surely improve upon it. Most of the times I see you blog on SEO, blogging tips, wordpress etc. With the name TECHZoomIn, let there be equal amount of real techie stuff inside (if not more) as the blogging related stuff.
Lastly, the keywords don't seem to be right for SEO. Have a relook at that as well.
All the best! Have a great 2009
-Theme- as said you need a new one, ironic as your tops posts are about god themes.
- Posting schedule – some days you have two posts others none, if you write two one day schedule one for the next day, that way giving time to digest a post.
- Recent comments – it seems to be broken
- Translate Buttons – They dont seem to work on the three random posts I selected.
Blogging is a good way to improve your language / English etc so keep at it and looking forward to read some useful stuff.
@Simon,
Thanks alot for your valuable feedback.
I am just new to this blogging world and learning the things just now.may be the niche is quite crowded,but i believe the formula that readers will award your hard work
Since my first lang is not english you may find some english mistakes and all,its is expected i guess
And the snow effect is for christmas,and i forgot to deactivate.just did that onea and thanks for the remind.
I removed the recents comments section and i need to work on many small small issues on the blog..but since am quite busy at my office work,it didn't happend.
Changing and getting a unique theme quite difficult for a new guy like me..But i hope i will do it atleast after 3 months from now
@Donace,
Thanks alot for all your feedback..def i will take all these as positive and work hard to take my blog to next leve
The design of the site is great, but I don't thing the site has a new concept. In matter of fact, it's really close to Blogging tips.com
Can't call myself faithful reader but I visit from time to time.
Answering questions
1. Lax himself I guess.
Friendly attitude, eager to keep discussion going.
2. Branding, choice of topics.
3. It feels like a blog… Very generic.
4. No consistent topics, posts focusing on bulks of WP themes – I know it gets people excited but how many bloggers really choose themes from such posts? And how many blogs there are posting bulks of themes?
General notes
5. Doesn't validate. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.tech… Some script errors, some are because page is defined as script and using deprecated stuff like target attribute on links.
6. Reasonably light but ~30% of site is JS. I don't see much dynamics, is it really used or just plugin leftovers or something like that?
Header
7. Logo is not consistent with favicon. Actually logo doesn't match anything at all.
Static pages
8. Fne overall except there is no reason to have sharing links on them.
9. Contact form is styled weird.
10. Blogroll sucks. By included definition it's link exchange dump.
Index
11. I dislike when something gets between title and excerpt. It lowers probability of reader jumping from title to further reading – a lot.
12. "More" link could be bigger and more obvious.
13. No proper pagination in the end.
Single post page
14. Don't like assault with "subscribe" at the top.
15. Empty tags on some posts.
16. Broken smileys styling in the comments. That's common problem on this theme, I wonder why no one bothers to fix it.
Sidebar
17. FB counter sucks, displaying with styled text is becoming a trend (at last!).
18. Titles are bit too long, tons of space lost to last 1-2 words getting on new line.
19. No way to determine main categories.
Footer
20. Too many horizontal lines without clear purpose.
Overall
Decent blog with plenty of personality behind it. Design stuff can always be fixed so I think that main issue here is getting some focus for content. If it's tech then more such posts, it it's WordPress themes that should be more obvious.
Here goes:
1. You've selected a good theme. However, it could do with some more customization.
2. The flags in the sidebar and the feedburner button would look good centered. IMO, the feedburner button can be knocked off since you already have the huge get updates by RSS portion at the top.
3. I had to delete "Type your Search here" manually.
4. Do you need the "Share and Enjoy" buttons as well as the huge Share / Bookmark this button? Also, why the tiny green bullet before each button.
5. It seems like you are just letting the plugins insert information where they want to instead of customizing where in the theme you want them to appear.
e.g. "Share and Enjoy" on your About page?
6. The footer looks a bit weird with the green lines.
7. The contact form needs to be styled better.
8. On a secondary noted, try getting hold of TechZoom.In
Tested in IE8 on Windows Vista.
I thanks each and every person who commented here.All you guys have given many useful tips and suggestions.
When it comes to the winner.I will select "Ajay" as the best. and @Simon will be the second with good critiques.
And finally a bunch of thanks to Kevin for taking this Critique.
Happy New year For all you guys..Enjoy
@Rarst and Raju,
Thanks for your great feedback dudes..
Almost all the friends told about the design and am taking it too serious to do something with that.
This example is more prominent because my blog (teraom.com )is also powered by the same theme. This theme is very good, but free of cost and hence the uniqueness is lost.
Every time I watch a blog, i see the same set of items on the sidebar – categories, recent posts. Something new here would spice up the blog a lot.
Also instead of doing this "continue reading", you might want to make use of excerpts – a little used feature in wordpress – in the homepage.
Adding something to the footer would not hurt.