Saturday, April 21, 2007

Mutual Blog Reviews – Part II

Last week I signed my self up for an MBR from Infektia. I have been asking people for a while now for any advice they can give me on what to do with my existing blog or new domain, but I got no feedback so it was nice to finally receive constructive criticism. I was beginning to doubt if there were any genuine readers here! Malin gave me a really good working over , hitting me hard with information that will soon make a big difference to this blog (I hope) and also threw a few complements my way which made the blows of criticism easier to absorb. It also helps that she is a woman. I am not sure if I could handle such brutal honesty from another man. Check it out.

Site: Indo Dreamin owned by Avi
Mutual review: Read Avi’s review of Infektia.net

What strikes me first is: Where is your header?
Am I missing something here? From what I can see is a huge white space before your blog starts. That’s really unnecessary if you aren’t planned to have a header (it’s preferable, it just need to be as simple as your blog’s name). It makes me wanna scream and run away actually ;).

Also if you click on “Home” on your blog it will take you to… your other homepage? Why not set it to the front page of your blog instead? It will only confuse the visitors.
You might wanna change the colors of your blog as well. The orange will hurt people’s eyes and the blue text on that background doesn’t look good. And change the text in the sidebar to align to the left instead of right.

Since I see it’s a Blogger blog I know there aren’t much you can do with it, but here is a tip for you; If you don’t know how, or don’t have the time, pick a premade theme, just something that is more visually appealing than the one you have now. Cause I’m going to be honest and say that it scares the visitors. You can take a look at some free Blogger templates here for example.
Content wise you have some really entertaining posts. And you have pictures in them! Yay! I like seeing pictures along with good content (however, don’t set them to be centered all the time make the text go around the image instead, it’s more visually appealing, and it’s easier to not loose the “story” while jumping down from an image). However I haven’t have the time to digg through your whole archive. I really enjoyed your
Books archive though, and I see that you enjoy Neil Gaiman! So do I!

I also read a lot of good posts in the 18+ archive, so good that I want to invite you to be a contributor/writer to Pleasure-Buzz.com! If you accept the invitation, send me a notice and I’ll send you the invitation link!
Since you have such good content, it would be a shame to scare off visitors because of the design of the blog. Change it, and the visitors will come… and stay! And by the way, more information about the author wouldn’t be bad either! ;)


Thanks for the review Malin!!! And yes, Gaiman is a fucking living legend. I think the MBR is a great concept and if I may, I would like to offer the same service to anyone here that would like it (although you would probably get a better analysis from Malin). Write a review about Indo Dreamin’ and I will write one back for you. Spread the love people!

There is a week long holiday coming up here in the beginning of March which I will have to keep my self entertained in, so revamping the blog would be a good project to hold of on till then. One thing I do not get though is the header thing. Am I the only one that can see the Indo Dreamin’ travel banner on the top of my blog? Also I do not know how to tie in my blogspot posts to my Indo Dreamin’ domain. I would really like to turn that domain into a wordpress blog but I do not want to loose my previous posts. If anyone got some pointers on how to do that, hook me up.

I am also taking Malin up on her offer to be a guest writer on Pleasure Buzz. I have seen some freaky stuff in the shops I have been itching to review and I also talked to Gonzo this morning and he is willing to share his unique insights on her blog as well. Time is still not on my side right now so I got to boot. Inny is here from JKT and we are heading out for another Ghanaian meal. Its good to have company at home again and what more my own brother.

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