David; blog owner of MyMacBuzz contacted me and asked if I could review his blog. I’ve reviewed a number of other blogs; Midnite Lily, What’s This Then?, Dustyhawk and a couple of others before. I stopped doing it at one point because it was taxing and review requests were for the wrong reasons.
A review from me is always honest and straight forward. I don’t get paid to say nice things and I won’t say nice things even if I was paid. My long term goal in this industry is to increase the value of websites me and my team produces for clients. My personal goal now is to be recognized as a ‘consultant’ who’d offer valuable web design experience to clients websites.
Therefore, if you’re looking for straight up feedback on your website or weblog then I’m here. So without further due, let’s help David locate his strengths and weaknesses.
What is MyMAcBuzz?
myMacBUZZ is a made-in-Malaysia weblog about all things Apple.
I’ve known MyMacBuzz since it first started but I don’t have a screenshot of the previous blog design. No matter, I’ll just start reviewing from top to bottom as usual.
I understand running a weblog can be tiresome after a long duration so the monetary effort is always a great effort driver. However, strategic advertising placement for monetary gain is different from just having advertising in your weblog. Now, a prominent 720 x 90 banner is placed on the top of the weblog with a button to buy the advertising space.
As I said, this might be good for monetary gain but I think the advertising is affecting the top area of the weblog. I feel because the black header area with a menu isn’t touching the sides, it makes it more difficult determining which is the header.
The header to me has a critical flaw as well. The pointed ‘arrow’ guiding the eyes of a user is really a double edged sword. One of the difficulties of working with arrows like this is not all users can determine which isn’t defining. In this case, is pointing to the weblog content or maybe it signifies the button for archives.
David has moved the sidebar to the prominent left side now. I’m not sure with the phrase ‘Welcome to MyMacBuzz’ because I feel it doesn’t represent the content below strongly. Probably using ‘About MyMacBuzz’ would be understood better and quicker.
When you want to feature an article or person or something, full prominence should be given to it in the area. At the moment, the featured article is hidden in the rest of sidebar items like it’s merely ‘just part of the content’.
The next weakness I found in the sidebar is each entry in Possibly related entries isn’t defined enough. At the moment, it looks like a block of paragraph text. Using bottom borders or bullet lists would help here.
I strongly feel the advertising placed in the Recent Comments area is unnecessary. Yes, again it might be for monetary gain but right now it’s disrupting the negative space in the area. In other words, it’s taking up too much room.
The one thing I really like in MyMacBuzz now is the entry title hovers. I can’t explain why but the light yellow background and maroon title just works. I wouldn’t call this a weakness but something just doesn’t feel right to me. We become familiar with a program after double-clicking on its icon daily. But if the icon is not standard everywhere around the Internet than it’s difficult familiarizing with it. This is what I’ve found with the icon used to represent the tags.
This is something MyMacBuzz should be proud of; advertisement placement in between the posts. I really like how it’s been represented. It’s not hidden but yet it’s effective because it’s using a transparent and the borders around it brings it out without invading the readers space. Very well done here and I should recommend this more.
Proceding on into the Archives page. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or an error. I see it showing March 13 just below the sorting by Year. But in the list below it starts from March 14. It’s rather confusing here. And I didn’t instantly get what the 14 beside each entry title meant until I rolled over and read the URL. In the Archives, I found the sorting by Section and Tags the best.
Well, we’re coming to the end of this review. The About Us is very detailed and the Contact Us is very straight forward so I’m not going elaborate further on those.
Overall, I don’t think MyMacBuzz has improved for the better in comparison of their last design. Main assumption from me is the blog now has moved to a different direction more towards monetary gain. Nonetheless, I wish MyMacBuzz the best in their new direction and hope to see more local coverage in the Apple scene.
[tags]MyMacBuzz, Apple blog, Web advertising, Blog advertising, Advertising position, Apple[/tags]
Hi Danny, thanks for your insightful and in-depth review. I wanted to respond to some of your points about the ads.
As you mentioned, one of the biggest changes is an increased amount of advertising space. My reasoning in moving the 728×90 ad banner to the top of the page was actually to make it less intrusive than being in between the nav and main content, where it was previously. Plus this is a position that you see on may high profile sites like Gizmodo, The Unofficial Apple Weblog and even ComputerWorld. I’ve actually consciously placed all my ads in spots where they are only ‘medium hot’ according to Google’s recommendations.
However, I’m interested to see more feedback on the new ad placements. Btw, did you see the advertising policy on the Ads page?
Again, thanks for your review. I hope you stay subscribed (the feed still hasn’t got any ads) and keep visiting. Take care!
Congratulations Danny. You are one of the lucky bloggers to be tagged by Ah Pek.
Ah pek, it would’ve been helpful if you told me what did you tag me with. Anyway, I think I know what i is. Will try to come up with the answers later. :)
David, sorry about the comment issue. No idea why did SK2 picked you up as spam. Nonetheless, thank you for informing me so I could dig it out instead of just deleting all the spam.
Cheers.
(unrelated) that reminds me, i still owe u a t-shirt from Indonesia! x_X do u mind one from Ozland?
No worries, Lily. I was just joshing around about bringing me back a gift. :)