chrissie

If you love clothes, then this blog may pique your interest — . Meet Michelle, the owner and author of Chic Armoire that is all about one girl in Central Virginia who is searching for intelligent fashion life on this planet. She has spent her entire life devoted to the world of paper cutting and dressmaking, breathed in the fashion magazines at a very early age, and was foreshadowing Steven Robinson’s LaCoste addiction by wearing one LaCoste polo dress for an interminable length of time. Michelle’s blog contains a host of fashion tidbits here and there, and whatever interest you may have in fashion, you will be sure to find it here. Read her recent posts to see how “deep” she is in: Tears of Joy (over a dress), Go International, Artbag of New York, SJP Bitten (it’s all ANYONE has been talking about this week), Fakes are never in Fashion, Q94 Melissa and Sid, Donatella Rules, June Rag Review Parts 1-3, Web Updates and many more.

Navigation on the site is very simple. The posts are right marginalized and the blog necessities are left marginalized in a navigation bar. The posts are relatively frequent, almost daily with a few exceptions, and the content is very conversational which suits this niche. There are plenty of pictures to satisfy fellow fashionistas as well. The left navigation bar contains her fashion story in the About Me section, as well as a host of fashion blogs to visit, recent posts menu, archives menu, and the Categories AKA “Everything in its Place” menu. If you are looking for something specific, you will find it in its place and the categories include accessories, the addict, banana republic, beauty, bliss, bumble and bumble, clothing, coach, fug girls, JCrew, mistakes, money, press, rags, RVA Fashionista, smashbox, storage, Style.com, Target, Tricks, and so much more.

I am going to give this one a 3.3. I like the navigation, and the content is somewhat unique from other fashion blogs. I really like the conversational style here. I also like how I am not swamped with advertising as I have been with previous fashion blogs (not necessarily for review, but on my own personal quest). I think this blog has a nice readership and could actually use a little bit of advertising if it wanted to monetize a little bit. I think some of the larger content pieces can be broken down into smaller posts to spread them out a little more. I also wouldn’t mind seeing more pictures, there are some on the main page currently, but when going through archives the blog gets a little dry viewing wise, not content. When a Prada bag is mentioned for example it wouldn’t hurt to induce other’s drool factors with a pic. Overall though, a very comprehensive fashion site that I wouldn’t mind seeing again.

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– Chrissie

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If you are new to blogging you probably have a lot of questions. How do I start? What do I do? How do I get people reading my stuff? Well, I can pretty much guarantee you that any of those questions and more will be answered here at Dummies Guide to Google Blogger Beta. Open the page and you will be greeted with many opportunities to join the site via feed or subscription. You can also peruse through some of the most recent posts: Blog and Ping to Attract the Search Spiders, Remove NoFollow Attribute on Comments, The Ultimate Blogger WordPress Comparison Guide, Blog Backlinks Chart in Technorati, Where is Site Traffic Coming From?, and Picture in Blogger Header – Update to name a few. I think if there is anything blog related, particularly google blogger related, you should be able to find the information here. Whether you are looking for graphic information, posting information, writing help, marketing your blog help, and so on, it’s all here. Those that run this blog have clearly been doing it for a long time, and you can see by their stats that they are doing pretty good at it. So the information they provide seems fairly credible.

Navigation on this site however is going to cause you some issues. I was not sure if it was my machine or the site, so I tried it on another machine and same problem. The site literally shut down my IE more than once. The site is extremely busy, and by that I mean, busy. There is advertising all over the place, and while I stumbled on some great information during the time that I could actually roam the site, I really had to dig for it. Mind you, if you are tossing the idea in your head to join the feed or subscribe, this blog gives you more than enough opportunities to do so, almost everything you read in fact on this site is a selling endorsement for the blog. In the left bar you will find a giant RSS Feed Reader subscription button that is so big it is the first thing your eyes will go to when you open the blog, then you will see standard counter widgets, ads ads ads, email subscription box, copyscape button, contact button, donation link offering three convenient methods to give them money, and did I mention the site has some advertising? Here in the left bar you can also find some blog resource links: header, ad free blog, autopinger, avatar maker, barcode maker, and so on. The right navigation bar is fairly standard, recent posts and even most popular posts so you can see by clearly defined title what posts have been the most useful. I did not look at every link, but the one I did go to was basically a wordpress vs. blogger comparison and the table that showed up on my screen was not complete, so I do say again, there are some serious formatting problems with the site.

The site is getting a 2.8 from me, only because I just found it very difficult to read. Also given that it shut down my IE, not only did I NOT want to subscribe, but I didn’t even want to stay there any longer than I had to. The site is so busy and spends so much time selling themselves, the content got a little lost as well. However when going through some posts, I found the writing to be very user friendly and well done for a blogger’s guide. The posts explain things to you like you are a two year old which is exactly what you need when you are just starting out in the very confusing world of blogging. I think this blog has a lot of resources and could be very valuable to a blogger, but some reformatting needs to happen before I would bookmark it.

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– Chrissie

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Car lovers will enjoy reading this blog, the The All Car Garage, The Ultimate Automotive News Resource. This site is dedicated to ensuring that any question you have on any vehicle is easily answered through their comprehensive compilation of anything that is automotive. Scroll through the recent posts to have a peek at some new models coming out: “2008 Chrysler Sebring to Make a Comeback” where you can see a vehicle that is one of the few offered as a sedan, coupe, and convertible; “Audi has Successful Tests at Le Mans” where you can get your car racing fix fixed; and a very comprehensive reviews on the “2008 Saturn Vue”, “2008 Altima 3.5 SE”, and “2008 Lexus LS600HL”.

The site is very easy to navigate, as there is not much meat to the site. Posts are centered down the page and there are both left and right sided navigation bars. In the left bar you will find some advertising as well as the recent links menu that will take you to the posts mentioned above, and a menu for the RSS feeds. You will also find a menu for favorite links where you can have your Mustang drool time and visit the Ford Mustang site and the Mustang forums. On the right navigation bar, you will find a laundry list of automotive links in the categories section, and if you are looking for a specific model, you will not be disappointed. Here you will find a link to every model on the market, as well as categories for automotive news, automotive reviews, auto racing, concept cars, editorials, videos, other stuff, and the Isuzu. You will also find a cool links menu where you can visit links for auto-refinance, car performance parts, custom motorcycle parts, ACF car loans, car transport-auto transport, and JDM HKS parts direct Japan.

I have to go with a 2.5 for this one. This sits has very little to it in terms of meat and content, or if it does, it is largely being overshadowed by its abundance of advertising. While the posts are well-written, they are infrequent. I would not give much for uniqueness to this blog either as to me it did not really set itself apart from many other automotive blogs. While it offers a nice variety of appropriate pictures for each of the cars it reviews, there could be more. For comprehensive reviews perhaps provide both exterior and interior views from different angles, or set up photo albums of specific vehicles that you want to highlight. I also would suggest re-formatting the advertising extensively. It almost seems as if every post contains advertising, and the ads are literally taking over the blog distracting from the useful content. I would add maybe an About Me page as well so the readers can get a sense of who and why the blog exists. Lastly I would suggest more frequent content. While there may be a finite amount of vehicles that can be reviewed, there is a wealth of automotive news available that could be brought to the website to keep the readership alive. With a few of these changes, I think this site could be well appreciated by the automotive aficionado.

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– Chrissie

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