Blogger Tips and Tricks is a website focused on the area of providing tips and tricks for users of the popular blogging service Blogger.com, however many of the posts can be aimed at both Blogger.com users as well as many other blog providers.
The design of the site is a simple blogger design without to much customization, however this suits in essence due to the site being about Blogger, it gives a sense to the visitor that they can quickly tell the blog may be of interest to them. However the general feel of the website is that it cluttered, and in essence it could do with less confusion with the menus and more focus on the content, however this is always a issue when the website owner is trying to earn themselves some money, it is a fine balance and with some tweaking this blog can get to the thin blue line. The Google adsense adverts are located on the left of the site, and somewhat blended into the design using the colors that the blog uses for links and background color, this could be due to the web blog owner wanting people to see the adverts as content, under the Google adverts is Amazon ones, however they suit the layout fine and the visitor can quickly tell that they are in fact adverts. However these adverts are not to much of a bug and after the visitor first visits they can quickly get used to the style of having adverts on the left menu. On the right menu is the normal blogger type links, or at least that what I thought until I clicked one. They are very well blended links that easily look like site content links, however once again after your first visit you quickly can get used to the advert position. Also on the right menu is recent posts, which is pretty much standard with all blogger blogs, this provides a easy way for the user to be quickly view past posts if he enjoyed the current ones. Nothing else is different about the right menu than with any other blogger blog. The main content area is well designed into the template, splitting up each post to make it easy on the eye and using bold colors that allow for the user to quickly scan the title text to see if the post will interest them. One thing however that does look out of place is the border around “NEWER POST HOME OLDER POST”, this looks almost as if it has been grabbed from elsewhere and placed onto the blog. Except for the small advert blending faults the design suits this web blog very well and is very easy on the eyes.
However in the eyes of many the design is only a small aspect of how good a website is, after all Bill Gates can be quoted to say “Content is King”, and this is very much true in web blogs. First I signed up to a blogger account to see if I could follow any of the tips provided without getting confused, and indeed I did find the tips very easy to follow and I did not get confused. The posts are direct to the point and in that essence are quick to read which means you can quickly gather the information that you want. Most of the posts are very visual with screenshots and other images. A example of this can be found on a post about Blogger tricks in which the blog post uses 2 screenshots to show the user in simple terms what the blog post is about. It is in this visual experience that the user gets drawn into reading the rest of the post, and more posts around the website. Each post links to other sources so that you can research more information about the blog in question. The posts are interesting to anyone who owns a blog account, and even I who don’t normally use a blogger site quickly worked out how to do the listed things.
In summery the site is a very useful blog for another who wish’s to get that little bit more out of there blogger website, and minus a few problems with the advert the design is easy on the eyes. I would rate this site a high 3, it would of got higher if it was not for the adverts