I have officially been to a website that has one of the most interesting ways of using a weblog that I have seen. “Horse Training Tips” is exactly what the title says; it gives horse training tips in weblog form. When I realized this, I was intrigued. How did the author make this kind of format work? I immediately delved in deeper, first going to the profile so I knew something more about the author.
His name is Andy Curry, but what I found disappointing is that his profile doesn’t tell much about his background with horses. All it says is he loves animals…especially horses. Well, I can see that, there’s a whole website devoted to the animals. What I wanted to know was, is he a professional trainer or is this a hobby? How many years has he been doing this? How many horses has he trained, or does he own? This is information that should be in a profile about a weblog dedicated to horse training.
Next, I began browsing the entries. A lot of these entries are structured like letters, ending with “Sincerely,” etc. And, there are a lot of external links for more information on the subject broached in the weblog. For example, there was a short tip about bucking horses, and at the end was a link to more information. However, these external links have to be copied and pasted into the URL bar! I found this very inconvenient; it isn’t very hard to add a link command into the html, I think of it as a common courtesy.
Now, I don’t know much about horse training. I did a little bit of riding when I was younger, but that’s about it. However, from what I read from the content, Andy seems to know what he’s talking about. But, it isn’t all tips, there are a few anecdotes, too, and I found these especially enjoyable. It gave the weblog a more personal feel and made Andy more human. It also made the weblog fit into the “Personal” category.
Unfortunately, there was one huge detrimental fact that reduced the overall score: when I clicked on the archive links, I received a “Page cannot be found” error, so only the posts under “Previous posts” were open to me.Horse Training Tips