World Web: a demonstrative blog review about a blog with worldwide reach

Hello, in this blog post Ill analyze World Web – a site with „Reviews, News, IT, Gadgets, Web, Security, Video”.

Design

+I like that you have put an image for of the blog posts; cool;
1. Black on white theme? A bit hard for the eyes;
2. Sometimes the theme has icons, sometimes there are labels; it’s a bit confusing;
3. The font with gray on white and small print is a bit hard to read;

Search Engine Optimization

+You use All in one SEO pack;
1. I advise you to read this article regarding All in one SEO pack;
2. You don’t need to add .html at the end of each article;
3. I’d do more efforts to get links to the web site;

Copywriting

+You speak a nice language, easy to comprehend (what an incomprehensible wording!);
1. You use a lot the exclamation mark in the titles of your blog posts (1, 2, 3);
I’d avoid making tabloid titles if your visitors are different than the tabloid readers;
2. Bad punctuation (space missing after the comma):
„Videos – News,Tutorials,Funny”;
3. The typical spacing for: „!”, „?”, „:” is this
[word][symbol];
You seem to prefer:
[word][space][symbol];
While not 100% bad, this is rather non-recommended solution;
4. The theme is little to none translated;
5. A lot of the messages on the blog are of poor quality to me; sex & Internet? „wow”;

The structure of information

+Lots of information, good structure of data;
1. Looking at the list of categories, I realize that your blog has a very broad targeting; while this is not necessarily bad, I’d think if perhaps it would be better to have a narrower scope;
2. On the „Archive” listing, in the sidebar, I’d also list the number of blog posts for each month; this will help me, your reader, understand how often you post each month;
3. The blog is a bit crowded for my taste; I’d put more emphasis on taking out unnecessary items from the web site;
4. How about having a link for subscribing to the RSS feed with comments of each blog post?

The logo

+I like that it’s not only a logo, it also has a tagline;

1. WorldWeb is already in the minds of your readers via the www acronym (World Wide Web); your blog has little chance to become more popular than the original acronym, so I’d look for another name;
2. The size of the name of the blog and the two taglines (News & Reviews) share the same font size; I’d make the taglines smaller;
3. The graphic in your logo is all about the „World”; Ok, I’m confused, where is the „Web” in the picture?
4. Your name is „WorldWeb” and you show an image with the world seen from outside; get it? It’s soooooooo simple; while having a complicated idea for a logo isn’t desirable either, having a bluntly simple idea (world – world) for a logo is a bad choice also;
5. I fail to see the vertical positioning is like this:
–––-2
–1
–––-3
Confusing;
6. I don’t think that the logo is very suited for black & white, poor resolution printing;

The search box

+I love the positioning – top-right corner of the page; perfect placement!

1. No translation? I’m lost;
2. The search box doesn’t say it’s a search box; yes, it has a magnifier, yes, it says „enter search keyword”, but it’s not that clear that we’re dealing with a search box; I’d put more emphasis on that;
3. Do this: see the text box, click inside the search box, click somewhere else on the page; the text „Enter search keyword” disappears when I click on the box, but doesn’t appear when I click away from the box; very bad behavior; if I were you, I’d put the label „Search” outside the box;

The popular / recent comments / Tags box

+It’s nice that you put three separate things in one small box;



1. I’d explain how did the popular choice has been made – either by the number of views or by the number of comments; you can either put a „?” with a link to explanation, or show the number of page views / comments for each blog post;
2. The title for the last comments should not be „Commented”, but „Comments” („Comentarii” in Romanian); the current description makes little sense;
3. You have translated „Comentate”, but how about „Popular” or „Tags”?
4. You seem to be using both tags and categories, which makes your blog rather difficult to understand;

The subscription box

+I like that I can subscribe to your blog’s comments;

1. You give me two options to subscribe to the blog posts (in the top line and via the icon for RSS) within just a small space, and I think this is just too much;
2. Even in English, this:
„Subscribe:   Posts   |   Comments”
would look better as:
„Subscribe:   posts   |   comments”;
3. I would use Google’s FeedBurner for both:
a. To have an good approximation of the number of subscribers to my RSS feed;
b. To allow using Email as a method of subscription to the blog’s posts;

The list of categories

+Very clear distribution of blog posts, I know easily how to find information;

1. Way too much categories, they barely fit in one screen;
2. I’d shrink the space between the categories;
3. Why English categories?

Other pages

+These are the necessary pages to have on a blog;

1. I fail to understand why these are „Other pages”; considering the structure of WordPress, these are, simply put, pages; they are not „other” pages;
2. Yet another case for use of exclamation points! It’s disturbing!

The footer

+You have a link to WordPress.org; nice karma to you!

1. I’d leave a separation sign between:
„World Web”
and
„Reviews, News, IT, Gadgets, Web, Security, Video”;
2. The line starts totally in English, and ends in Romanian („Folosim”); confusing;
3. You don’t list any theme in the footer, yet I looked in the source code and saw this:
<meta name=”generator” content=”Fresh News 2.0.7″ />
<meta name=”generator” content=”Woo Framework Version 1.0.7″ />
So, it seems you are using a Woo Themes theme, called Fresh News; sure, you may have made your own theme, but I doubt that in the two months since launching you got to 2.0.7 version;
It all leads to the conclusion of taking out the reference to the original theme, which is bad karma; yeah, it’s unethical also; yeah, you can also be sued for this;

The comment box

+It’s great to have an email subscription feature;

1. If I were you, I’d avoid the double brackets:
„Mail (will not be published) (required)”;
Instead, I’d make it like this;
„Mail (will not be published, required)”;
You can further improve it by making a positive affirmation, rather than a negative one:
„Mail (will remain private, required)”;
2. I’d specify, at the Website field, that that field is optional;
3. This sounds a bit offensive:
„Si parerea ta conteaza !”;
Your opinion counts too? This is something like:
„Yes, everybody knows that I’m close to perfect, I have like this wonderful blog; but I have great news! Your opinion is really not that bad, also, and I’m giving you the privilege to comment on my wonderful, oh-so-beautiful blog post”;
I don’t like this;
4. You’re missing a comma here:
„Doresc sa fiu anuntat cand cineva raspunde dupa mine dar fara sa comentez „;
This: „dar fara sa comentez” (without commenting) is an unnecessary affirmation, which makes the understanding of the blog post even more difficult; cut it, without looking back;

The page of a random blog post

+It’s very nice to have sharing options at the very end of an article;
1. I’d prefer that the URL also contain the year and the month, if I find that article on Google I’d already know the approximate date it was written on;

2. I’d suggest you do read this article of mine regarding adding social networking buttons; your major faults right now are:
a. Way to many sharing options;
b. Too much space taken by the buttons;
c. You use social networks not likely to be used by Romanians (Yahoo! Buzz? Gmail Buzz? Stumble Upon?);
3. If you only have one author for the blog messages, the „Author” box is unnecessary;
4. Why write your name with the family name first? As it sounds, the first name should be first; instead of:
„Polec Eric Eduard”,
I’d suggest you to have:
„Eric (or Eduard, whichever you prefer) Polec”;
5. You say „Contact the author” and provide a link; the typical action which I expect after performing the click would be opening a page with contact information; your present action is opening the email client (via mailto: function); in this case, I’d rename „Contact the author” with the blunt, specific and clear „Email the author”, which might give me a better clue on what the link does;
6. To me, it’s not clear what the tags icon stands for;
7. I’m not specifically attracted by the tags:
„amuzant, caricatura, comic, efecte, efectele noului iphone, enjoy, foto, iPhone, iphone3, iphone4, photo, poza, situatie”;
For example, „enjoy” is not really a tag, „efectele noului iphone” can’t possibly be used to find a lot of messages on this blog, you use all the variations of a word (foto, photo, poza);
I’d much rather use a smaller number of tags, and try to keep them as relevant as possible;
8. I’d put an option for RSS subscription for the comments of each blog post; if I wish to see what do others comment on a blog post, I would like to have this option; details;

The recent posts section

+I like the fact that you also list the date of each entry, makes it easy to know how often you post;

1. Again, you use exclamation marks!
2. In WordPress the most typical usage of the current function is putting „Recent posts” in the widgets area; you prefer to use a feed to your own blog; a bit strange;
3. I think you should allow for more horizontal space for the items, so that they don’t split onto 2-5 rows;
4. The oldest news into your item is 6 weeks ago; that’s hardly any news;

About page

+It’s very nice that you included such a page on your blog;
1. I’d expect more information on the team composing the blog, on the theme subject, on the blog’s history; feed me!
2. You’re two months old, you say you will publish monthly statistics, and yet you fail to do so:
” iar un raport lunar al popularitatii va fi afisat pe aceasta pagina.”;
3. Why name the page „About” and not „Despre”?

Be a partner

+Very nice idea;
1. Too many exclamation points!
2. „siteu” (written like this repeated times) is written („site-ul”) correctly (or „siteul” at least);
3. You suggest your viewers to view a certain page („Raspuns: Vezi pagina Statistici WorldWeb !”), yet you don’t provide a direct link; hey! This is wikipedia-millenium! Use links!

WorldWeb Statistics
+Nice page;
1. Comma missing:
„Pentru cei interesati statisticile”;
2. In the following sentence:
„Pentru cei interesati statisticile WorldWeb pot fi vizualizate aici in format .pdf si exportate direct din serviciul Google Analytics.”;
you give the impression that the viewers can both view the page (which is correct) and export statistics from Google Analytics (which is false);
3. I don’t think that this is proper wording:
„monitorizarea cititorilor”
You monitor your readers? Perhaps counting is better;
4. I’d avoid hard-to-prove affirmations such as this:
„un serviciu foarte sigur si precis de la Google.”;
If you put two counters, one from Google Analytics and another one from a different source, you are likely to see that your „very precise” evaluation is about to fail („very precise” equals zero differences and errors, which is false);
Also, to guarantee, yourselves, the safety standards of Google, is a bad idea – how do you know what Google will do in one year’s time?

_________
Bottom line: World Web is a wonderful web site, with very nice things to be proud of.