Week Two Assignment: A Web Review of the Web
This week, the burden’s fallen on me to review a number of blogs that revolve around ‘lifestyle’. Now since this is a particularly convoluted genre (hobbies? interests? sports? career?), I hadn’t really got a clue where to start. As with all people lost on the back roads of the net, I did the only thing I could.
Yes, I visited Google.
Now, without further ado, here are three randomly chosen ‘lifestyle’ blogs, and my thoughts on each one:
Charles & Marie
At first sight, this website doesn’t seem quite…right. For starters, there aren’t really any blogs visible – and there are various things for sale, besides. In fact, it just seems to be a mass of images, random paragraphs, and overpriced-yet-unnecessary items.
Looking closer, however, there are actually blog posts on the website. They’re just fairly well hidden (ignoring the text ‘navigator’s blog’ which – lets be honest – isn’t that noticeable): scrolling down a little, you can find thumbnail pictures which, if you hover over them, give snapshots of the blog they link to. It’s kind of nifty, but then you remember that you actually had to find that out – it wasn’t that obvious when you entered the site.
So, this blog may be colourful, well endowed with images and fairly useless wares: but for the purpose of being a user-friendly blog, it’s a failure.
PumaTalk Lifestyle
This blog is more promising: simpler, easy to navigate, stylish and humorous. Well, it is at first sight: scrolling down and looking at the blog posts, the reader will find out that the blog focuses solely on the Puma brand of trainers. New designs, adverts, people sponsored by the company, you name it. Not really my cup of tea.
Functionally, however, the blog is pretty spot on: there’s a box to the right describing the reasons why the blog exists, and each post is written with simple sentences and small, easy-to-scan paragraphs. The writer even throws in various pictures, videos, and bullet-pointed (or numbered) information, to break up the text even more. Readers will be able to find out what this blog’s about pretty easily, and then will be able to scan through the posts themselves and get the gist of what they’re saying, without too much effort.
All in all, bit of an odd topic for a blog – but the way it’s designed and written is superb.
Scripps News
This is easily the most appealing blog I found, stylistically speaking. It’s quite a standard layout – items of interest on either side, posts in the middle – but that’s the beauty of it: it makes it much more accessible.
The posts on the front page are only previews of each actual blog – so that the reader can scan each post, and choose the one that interests them. I find this feature pretty useful, because it takes so much less time to scan for what I want to read. The posts themselves vary from post to post – but that’s because they’re sourced from different news outlets…and besides, it’s all part of the charm.
So, if you want to see how well structured blogs can be – or if you particularly like reading American news – Scripps News is definitely the place to start.
