There are many web sites that offer or provide information about free stuff. Some of the sites are quite useful, while others are just scams. I rarely visit them, but this week I’ll look at a blog focused on this topic.
While the author does attempt to keep the blog focused, it appears that at times it is hard to maintain. Unfortunately, there are a few other issues, besides the focus, with the blog that is reviewed this week.
Web Site: Anything for Free
Description: This blog is a collection of great freebies that I found on the internet: free movies, free e-books, free songs, free printables, free ringtones, free lyrics, free advice, free tips, free newsletters, free tutorials, free how-to’s, free recipes, free software, free magazines, free articles, free games and more freebies. You would also find reviews of outstanding websites that provide freebies.
Design 
The blog is arranged into two columns: a left column for the content and a right column for the navigational links. There is also a header that describes the blog and is made to look like a coupon. The light-pink of the header also stands out since the other colours used are a darker hue.
With regards to actual content section, it does have an issue on Internet Explorer 7. On Firefox 3.0, I was able to display multiple posts on the home page, however, on IE 7 only the latest post is shown. On top of that, the background colours for both the content and sidebars are missing so the background was white. On Firefox 3.0 everything appears normal.
The font size used for the posts is rather small and could cause problems for those that have trouble reading small print. Increasing the font size should be done to make it easier to read the posts. The titles of each post are nice and large and stand out among the posts. Below each post title is a Google Adsense ad, although only for the first three posts. Since Google only allows three Adsense units, the remaining posts just display a blank space. I recommend removing the ads below the post titles which will remove any blank spaces.
The sidebars suffer from unorganized clutter. There are many widgest display haphazardly throughout the sidebar. This made it hard for me to find any of the navigational links. I did manage to find the archive and category links, with the category links being a different link colour – blue. The sidebar should be reorganized with the links near the top. Many of the widgets should also be removed because of page loading time.
Page loading time was another issue I found. It took some time to load up each page of the blog, mainly because of the large number of widgets located in the sidebar. Reducing the number of widgets displayed should be a priority when organizing the blog.
There are several design issues that will need to be addressed to make the blog much better to read.
Focus 
The focus of the blog seems to move away from the original topic of free things. While reading several of the posts, it appears that such things as PayPal and Web traffic are discussed. While most of the posts are concentrated around free items, a few seem to move away from that focus.
Keeping a blog more on focus will help to keep visitors returning for more.
Content 
With regards to blogs, it is usually better to blog on a regular basis to provide consistent content to your subscribers. While the author does provide many posts throughout a month, there is no consistency.
One month the author may write 20 posts, while the next only 3 posts are published. There may be times where the author writes two posts in one day, but then doesn’t publish a post for a few weeks. There is no consistency with posting. You don’t have to post on the same days each week, but a least one to two posts would be better than not posting at all.
The posts themselves are small as each one is only two to four paragraphs in length. Some posts contain a small image that appears to be related to the subject of the post. The images do add some nice colour to the posts.
With small posts, it should be easier to post on a more regular basis.
Spelling and Grammar 
There are a few spelling and grammar mistakes that did cause me to reread a sentence a few times to understand what the author was saying. For the most part, each post was easy to read and most mistakes didn’t take away from the readability of the blog.
Overall
The concept of providing information about free items is great, but the design takes away from the idea. There are many flaws with the design, such as not working properly in Internet Explorer 7, small fonts and an unorganized sidebar. The loading time is also fairly high, especially for a blog that isn’t too graphic intensive.
Fixing the design should be a priority if the author wants to make this blog much better than it currently is.
Have Your Say
- What do you think about Anything for Free?