Author: admin

My first thoughts on viewing Hormones-Beauty-Health was that a) it was not a blog and b) it wanted to sell me something. I guessed it wanted to sell me one of many things sold via the internet that most people would never set out intending to buy, which makes a website necessary to advertise, sell, and cleverly cross-reference the product with other sites. My first impression turned out to be too cynical and flighty with its love of flitting from first glance to conclusion. Hormones-Beauty-Health does have a blog and it wants to sell you something, but the site offers a lot of free information, recipes, and tips.

The main site design, riddled with Yahoo ads as well as links to what appears to be every page on the site, tastes a tad like spam. The pictures and text seem like they were dashed down quickly, to get the site up as fast as possible, though the pink and white colors are nice. Getting to the blog requires some link-hunting (hint: instead of scrolling down the page, just search out “blog” in the menu at the top). It’s a WordPress blog and is much more attractive than its companion site, mostly due to the aesthetics of the WordPress template, the customized banner balancing lily with beautiful woman, and the backgrounds in subtle shades of linen.

Here, all the ads are confined to the sidebar. Surprisingly, there is an assortment of goodies in the blogroll, including the artsy boygirlparty.livejournal.com and refreshing creative writing on bluishorange.com. I found a few new favorites in the blogroll, though its contents were strangely juxtaposed to the content of this particular blog. It piqued my curiosity about the blogger, but unfortunately, the “About” section only displayed the default WordPress message. Some of the blogs listed were weirdly popular and/or mainstream, such as the Blog of a Bookslut and Cute Overload, not to mention Google’s Blog. My cynicism began fluttering again, as I wondered if linking to an assortment of popular, though unrelated blogs was a marketing strategy to increase traffic to Hormones-Beauty-Health. I liked many of the blogs listed, but in a specialized blog like this, it would be more beneficial both for the blog and the reader if the blogroll contained more relevant sites.

The blog posts contained a luscious assortment of homemade recipes for all-natural beauty regiments as well as vegetarian dishes. They offer a lot of health tips, tricks, and information, many of which I’d never heard before and might try in the future. The tip about brushing cornstarch into oily hair made me cringe, but my hair is unreasonably oily, and I’ll try anything, especially if it is as innocuous and inexpensive as cornstarch.

A lot of people will find this blog useful and surprising. If you are health-conscious, vegan, and care about your appearance, this blog consistently offers sweet soy tidbits for your taste buds. Naturally, if you like their free advice, they hope you’ll buy some of their products, so they regularly plug posts with offers from their sponsor, an independent consultant for Arbonne International, a line of beauty products. There are plenty of archives to research, which is always a plus. The first entry, made in December of 2005, is titled “Introduction” and with some punching up, could be the “About” section this blog needs. It starts off, “This Blog is designed to keep you informed on Women’s Health and Beauty Issues.” Nice.

I wish there was a category for “Health” or “Product,” because “Personal” doesn’t seem to fit. Though it’s a few sizes too big, it’s the only one that comes close to fitting, so there it is.
NULL

I wasn’t sure how a “Web 2.0 Directory” would qualify as a blog. But it turns out that the author has made his “Directory” a blog and not a directory at all.

The first thing I noticed was that the url for this site was a blogspot hosted site. I have nothing against blogs being on blogspot per say, but if you are going to have a site called “Web 2.0 Directory” I think it should be hosted at its own domain.

The design of the site is rather bland and boring. It has this massive header that tells us the site has been around since December of 2006 and is tracking all the new web sites out there. Ok that’s fine, but 33% of my screen for this header is not needed. The rest of the design is a standard 3 column layout with the content in the center. Nothing about this design says “Hi I am a directory”.

The posts are boring as all get out. In fact they don’t really do much of anything other than describe a website. Some of the descriptions are one sentence long which leads me to my next thought about this site.

The site screams it is a spam site. Or at the very least, set up to just generate money and not actually do anything for the reader. There are many little details that lead me to believe this. First the author had the max number of google ads on the site. In addition to those the author has a nice break down of categories and wouldn’t you believe that the Pay Per Post category has one of the most posted to categories?

In addition to that the author has at the end of every post a link to every single site that you can submit your URL to such as del.icio.us, digg and others. All in the hopes that people will link back to his site.

This site fails miserably at what it says it is. It is not a directory by any means. It isn’t even what one would call a “Web 2.0” site. I really think the author should say that the purpose of the site is just to make me money and that is it. I think a complete restructuring of the site is needed if he wants to keep using the “Web 2.0 Directory” as the name of his blog.

NULL

I had no idea what this blog would be about upon reading the title, and even after the initial page loaded, I still wasn’t 100% sure what the point or the main subject of this blog would be. I did the best thing I know how to do with something like this – I dove in head first.

The layout is a bit cumbersome. My screen resolution is set at 1440 x 900, and even with that much room, my screen still looked cluttered as I scrolled through the last two months or archives. It looks to be one of the infamous standard Blogger templates with more information added into the sidebar then it was designed to hold.

There were seven different links across the top of the design that I thought would lead me to different areas of the site, where I could find out more information, since this topic is something I’ve never done any reading about. When I realized that all seven of those links were different Blogspot hosted URLs, I didn’t even bother clicking on them. It seemed like a pretty lazy way to let people work their way through learning about the site at hand.

According to some information the author’s placed in the sidebar, the idea of this particular blog is as follows: “My plan is to each day try to find out something new to research – a place, a person, a house, an idea – anything that interests me.” With the self-description, it becomes obvious that this site has been created for the author’s own personal use, rather than to involve any regular readers he might have.

The author, I found from the sidebar once again, is a an architect in a Malaysian private practice. Learning his occupation explains why this topic is so fascinating to him to some degree, and my engage readers who have similar background to his.

Overall, I can’t say I’d visit this blog again. Having not one ounce of knowledge on the architectural subjects the author mentions, I wanted to find a post that would excite me about the topic and pull me into want to learn more. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. For those in a related industry, maybe that doesn’t need to happen, and this site will be just fine the way it is.NULL

Shucking oysters, shelling peas – I seriously had no idea what I was going to be reading; I only knew I have a strong distaste for both oysters and peas, so this could be a horrifying time of reading a blog.

The first thing I had to do was start at the beginning of this blog and see why it all started and where it’s gone since then. March of this past year is when the site first started, but the only other two months listed within the archives along the sidebar are June and July. There were 61 posts written on March 7th according to the archives, so it sounds like maybe this blog had a home elsewhere before finding itself on Blogspot.

Being hosted on the infamous Blogspot usually means the layout will be one of their templates that have been provided, and this site was no exception to that rule. It’s an easy to navigate layout, though, so finding the things you need is simple.

Quite simply put, this blog is about food. There are a few various other topics thrown in from time to time – a U.S./Italy soccer game or a cute tale of the author’s parents’ dogs and their distaste for American rawhides – but overall, this is going to be a site for those folks we refer to around here as foodies.

It’s hard for me to relate to a blog that goes into great detail about either recipes or the quality of food that the writers have sampled in various restaurants. I’m a creature of habit when it comes to ordering things in any restaurant, and I find Velveeta Shells & Cheese an acceptable meal from time to time.

The author does manage to make an effort in keeping the attention of people not as into such fine food as myself. There’s a post that’s full of YouTube videos, including a link to The Geeky Gourmet, which is definitely on my line of kitchen-work. My friends are going to be so impressed when I serve sake in a cup made out of a cucumber. Maybe more scared than impressed actually…

Overall, this site won’t appeal to every random blog surfer. However, if a random blog surfer happens to have suggestions on how to bake quail in champagne or has an interest in whipping up an authentic Italian stewed squid recipe coming straight from the author’s mother-in-law, this will be a place they can add to their bookmarks. The site is very good at what it’s meant to be good at – food.
NULL

Dave’s Guide to the Best of the Web is a pretty straight forward title and fits perfectly to his very straight forward blog of sharing some of the best websites he’s found. Easy enough, right? Let’s see if I agree.

I immediately noticed that Dave’s Guide to the Best of the Web has only just started on July 8th of this year, making this site extremely new.

The first few entries were sites I’ve been familiar with for a long time – Skype, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Napster, etc. These are all tools and URLs that have been around the web several times and don’t really have anything new and improved to offer. With these links, the author just gives readers information on what the program/tool/etc. actually is and what it actually does.

I don’t really understand the point of this site. Is it just to have any popular technology, like the links to Apple or ASP.net, linked in one general location? Dave doesn’t make much of attempt to give a review of any product, but instead chooses to be very neutral in its descriptions. Since the site is called Dave’s Guide to the Best of the Web, we automatically assume that these are the best links ever. And maybe they were a few years ago.

The layout is simple and easy to click through by various categories or date. The “about the author” section reveals very little about the site. Readers also have the option to recommend a website to Dave.

I don’t get the site or how it’s a new revelation to the blogging world, but the author does write very well in his descriptions. Punctuation, grammar, spelling, etc. all seems right on the money, and for me, that’s the biggest redeeming quality I could find
NULL