25
Mar
By Web-Reviews.com @ 11:51 am
Blogs : Music
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22
Mar
By Web-Reviews.com @ 10:10 am
Home & Leisure
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| A few years back I remember watching a show on PBS about gardening using a square foot block at a time. The host Mel Bartholomew walked the viewers threw the process of setting up a Square Foot Garden and gave many great tips on gardening in general. That show is gone now, but I recently came across SquareFootGardening.com and it has renewed my intrest. |
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Content ( ) |
| SquareFootGardening.com is the official website of Mel Bartholomew, the author of the all time best selling gardening book “Square Foot Gardening”. The website offers a few quick how-to articles and quite a few articles in the “Mel’s Columns” section that I found to be rather informative.The site does sell many products and is heavily weighted towards the sale. I think this site could benefit greatly from a blog or a forum. I can see this becoming a very popular site quickly if a best selling author would blog about his garden once or twice a week. Having that type of interaction would entice visitors to return more often, and returning visitors equal greater sales, it is a win win! |
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Design ( ) |
| SquareFootGardening.com has a very simple design. While it is easy to navigate (and that is important) it is visually disappointing. There is nothing about this sites design that I walk away remembering. The owner of the site is not only a best selling author but was the host of a long running PBS show about Square Foot Gardening, these factors really make me long for a more appealing site, and with the large archive I am sure Mel has, I hope he decides to update the look! |
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| Conclusion |
| SquareFootGardening.com presents an innovative idea in gardening and provides enough information for an inexperienced gardener to get started. The articles are informative, but I would like to see more of them and I would like to see some sort of social addition to the site. Overall, I think the sites rating is grater than the sum of its parts because of the innovative and interesting ideas presented. |
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| Pros: |
Innovative ideas, good articles. |
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Poor design, lack of social networking. |
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| Square Foot Gardening |
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15
Mar
By Web-Reviews.com @ 11:05 pm
Blogs
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| As the Blogosphere continues to grow an odd side effect is that one of the most popular things to blog about is blogging. There are blogs about how to write content, what content to write about and there are even blogs about how to write blogs about blogs. BloggingTips.com, however, is one of the blog oriented blogs that I find usefull. |
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Content ( ) |
| BloggingTips.com has a large list of writers, and for the most part they are knowledgeable and helpful. I have found many of the tips that they provide to be useful and I have even implemented a few of them.New posts are posted multiple times a day, and many of them are high quality. With subjects ranging from SEO (search edging optimization) to design all the way to monetization BloggingTips.com offers quit a bit of information that any blogger will enjoy. I would have rated the content 5 stars if it were not such an over saturated niche. |
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| BloggingTips.com has a nice simple design, with quite a few unique and interesting graphics in many of the posts. This site suffers from one of the biggest problems I am finding with blogs. They place ads above navigation, forcing scrolling to get to the content links.While they do have ads above their navigation, they have added a few navigation links to the header of the site that makes navigation a little easier. This little addition helped me keep the rating at 4 stars.Other than the ad placement I have no complaints about the sites design. It is attractive and simple, two things I like to see in a blog! |
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| Conclusion |
| If you are looking for some good advice about blogging BloggingTips.com is a great resource. I use this site myself and would suggest it to anybody who is a blogger or is thinking about entering the Blogosphere! |
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| Pros: |
Great information, useful tips, frequently updated blog. |
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Another blog about blogging. |
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13
Mar
By Web-Reviews.com @ 4:44 pm
Tips & Advice
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Top 5 Blog Content Mistakes
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| The most important part of a blog that attracts visitors and entices visitors to return time after time is great content. Design is important, but many readers will continue to visit and read a poorly designed blog with great content, but a well designed blog with poor content will have a hard time finding visitors.Here is a list of the top 5 blog content mistakes that I have come across recently. |
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Spelling/Grammar Errors |
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| Blogs are some of the most frequently updated websites on the net. I often find many bloggers that seem to push out so much content that they do not proof read. There are few things that make a website more difficult to read than frequently misspelled words or poor grammar. |
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| Incorrect spelling and poor grammar can be extremely distracting from the blogs content. You could spend hours writing a post that has great information, but if there are spelling and grammatical errors on the blog that is all the reader will remember. |
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| The best way to prevent spelling and grammatical errors is to write all your blog posts in a word processing program (my favorite is MS Word) that has spell check and grammar checking abilities. Once you have the post written you can transfer it to the blog management software. |
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Stay on Topic |
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| When blogging it is important to write about a niche you know about. I often run across blogs that are about anything and everything. There is no clear topic and there is no clear direction of the blog. This can be confusing and disorienting to a reader and should be avoided. |
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| The best, and most popular blogs are those that have a clear subject matter. It is okay, from time to time, to add a post that is off topic, but it is very important to have a clear topic of discussion. |
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| A great example is ShoeMoney.com. ShoeMoney.com is a blog about internet marketing and it stays on topic for most posts. Every now and the author will throw in off topic posts about Mixed Martial Arts and a few other topics. This works well because there is a clear subject, but the readers get to know a little bit about the author with the off topic posts. |
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Obvious Paid Blog Posts |
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| Many websites are willing to pay a decent amount of money to get bloggers to talk about their website. Paid blog posts are becoming one of the better ways to advertise a product as well as a great way for a blogger to monetize their website. |
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| The issue comes when the paid post is so far off topic that it becomes obvious. I was browsing a blog that was about video games and found a post about hitting the first page of Digg.com with links to sites that have nothing to do with video games. |
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| This process is distracting and takes away from the bloggers credibility. It is widely known that many bloggers accept money for posts or links, it just looks very bad when they do not fit into the theme of the blog. |
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Lack of Unique Content |
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| Why would anybody want to go to a website to read content that they can get from many other sources? There are many articles available from websites like EzineArticles.com that I see ending up on many blogs. Unique, compelling content is what attracts visitors and keeps them coming back. |
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| If you find an article that you like, give a summary about it, link to it, and then give an opinion or a unique view on the subject. Posting the article on a blog as unique content adds nothing to your site, and as a side note, it hurts your sites SEO (Search Engine Optimization). |
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Lack of an Opinion |
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| Blogs have become popular, in part, due to the vast opinions that are shared. Opinions are what I would consider the lifeblood of the Blogosphere. |
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| I have come across many blogs that are just posting facts and offering no commentary about it. Blogs, for the most part, are not intended to be passive observers or non-biased reporters. When visiting a blog, I want an opinion, I want bias, I want spin! If I want unbiased news I will go to FoxNews.com (Do you smell the sarcasm there?) |
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11
Mar
By Web-Reviews.com @ 11:25 am
Uncategorized
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