Movie Blog Review: Four of Them
Readers of Anomalous Material, your attention please! Ripley, winner of last month top contributor contest, has requested a blog review as one of her prize. What is a blog review? If you are familiar with LAMB’s blog blustering concept then you already know what it is. You visit someone’s blog and then critique what is good and bad about it as well as give feedback on how to make it a better blog in the comments.
Some aspects to consider:
- First impression: Good/Bad? Would you leave the site right away? Why?
- Header, title, branding: Any improvement possible?
- Appearance: Color scheme, general appeal, readability, theme design, clean/cluttered?
- Content: Interesting/boring? Unfocused/themed?
- Writing: Does she have a personality? lively? funny? puts you to sleep? spelling/grammatical mistakes?
- Navigation: Can you find what you want to read? Quick/slow loading? Sidebars?
- Community: Is there one? comments, polls, contest, interactivity, participation in greater movie blog community, quality etc…
- Misc: autoplay music? (lol don’t do it), ads, anything else you can think of
- What would you change if this was your blog?
Some guidelines:
- No pity. Throw it all out there. She demanded it, let’s give it to her!
- A little tact goes a long way so be honest but respectful
- Give it a grade if you wish
- If you want to be anonymous, that’s fine but I don’t see no reason for that.
Now dear readers, please visit Ripley’s Four of Them thoroughly and then come back and leave comments on what’s good or bad about it as well as give feedback on how it could be improved. Thanks to all of you!
30 Comments
I have 3 mild blusters for Rip’s site:
1. It sounds like a 15 year old Jewish girl wrote the posts… haha… just kidding!
2. I believe you switched your layout, right? The site looks good and very clean but there’s nothing too visually stimulating to look at. It’s chromatic for lack of a better word. Needs some color splash!
3. A good suggestion someone made to me is to have some fun reoccurring themed posts. I didn’t notice any on your site… I find I get heavier traffic for mine cuz there’s a familiarity with the reader… like my FILMS YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU NEEDED TO SEE or REASONS MOVIES RULE series… just food for thought.
At the very least, you’re entertaining to read and that’s all that really matters! And you get props for putting yourself out there for this!
Been a fan of the blog for a long time, so I’ll vote you pick a name and stick with it
Always entertaining to read so one can never complain there.
* I’d say you could benefit by reorganizing your images on the left some, and giving them links to sites. The html for that is so that way when someone clicks on them they go to another part of your site. If you need help with this I can help yah out.
* Also be careful with naming so your headers don’t spill off the barrier allotted to them.
* Maybe try a banner or two, to help out with what Kaiderman pointed out about appeal. I know some blogs just pick a personal favorite movie poster and swap them around every week or two (could make it a part of your website – weekly routine or something).
Keep up the content though. Always a favorite to read.
The biggest complaint on mine was to do a banner. I switch mine around every month or so and nobody liked it… but I do so eff it!
Yeah, I have an unfair advantage in the Banner department. I hijacked my sister the art major and made her done one for me as a Christmas present
.
I’m afraid I can’t change the banner situation. See, my sister picked the thing out, and she was so goddamn excited about it, saying how it looked all professional and shit. I didn’t have any strong feelings either way–sure, it was very clean looking and all, but also boring, and really, I just didn’t care much how it looked–so I let her change it. And I guarentee you, she will be most upset if I do a thing outside of the sidebars.
A hearty thanks, all involved in good-telling!
I would actually dig some image-link assistance. And banner-ness, if I can get Sister to stop wailing.
(…)
haha I just realized the html code I posted was grabbed by the site thinking I had something to post. The code is:
a href="example.com"; :img src="imagelink"/; /aor it’ll read those symbols entirely thinking I’m trying to do code bah humbug (grabs complaining stick) going to attack Castor in a second. The : should become the less than symbol (shift + ,) and the ; should become the greater than symbol (shift + .).
Hope that helps.
So, uh, I put this code overlapping the picture, or what?
I love Four of Them! I agree with most of what people above are saying…maybe the sidebar should do a little more linkage, and perhaps more color? I also agree with Kaiderman that maybe a recurring-themed post would be good. But really, your writing is so sharp and entertaining, never too long-winded but also not wimpy. You do a great job encouraging comments and it’s always fun to read…I love the variety in the posts. Gah, keep up the good work!
Center aligning the sidebar would be a good start. As well as adding something visually appealing to the top of the page.
Content is solid, good following on comments too.
First impression: Like previous posters said, the blog is a bit bland in terms of color scheme. It could definitely use a light touch of vibrant colors to make it more appealing. Blog is fairly light and loads relatively quickly
Header: Your blog could use a banner. Banners help people identify a graphic representation with your site. A tagline could also be used under “Four of Them” so visitors get some idea of what your site is about.
Appearance: As said above, your theme is clean but a bit empty and boring. A banner and more colors would go a long way toward fixing that.
Content/writing: The content is interesting although your writing style may turn off some readers. The following are only suggestions to improve your writing: Try to use less “I” or “my” (Read around this and other blogs to see if the first person is as common) in your writing. The truth is 99% of readers are not interested in personal diaries and are reading to learn something for themselves. Additionally, the swearing and lower-grade language such as “whatever”, “like” “tis”, “shit”, “fucking”, “freaking” etc… should be cut out completely unless you want to make a very strong point. Finally, try to transition from bullet point writing to full paragraphs. These suggestions should go a long way toward improving your writing.
Navigation: Your blog could use some type of navigation menu or bar so we can find all posts of the same type (for example “Thoughts about movies”) Learn to use categories and pages. The labels on the left sidebar could be removed as they only clutter the sidebar and do not help navigating your blog.
Community: There is a nice budding community and you do get back to your visitors so good job on that. I see you are also using polls so keep doing that. I don’t see a blogroll so starting one may help you reach new readers. You also obviously participate in the greater movie blog community so good on you! One thing I have to be honest on the behalf of myself and others is that you should focus on quality instead of quantity when commenting. One liners and one-two sentence comments are considered “low quality” as they do not bring anything to the conversation and most consider those spam.
-I’m rather fond of my layout, see, I could probably tweak the color if I can find where I got it to begin with.
-I made a banner, but never got around to applying it, although I did make a site to test it out: http://fourathem.blogspot.com/
-As a member of the elusive Teenaged race, I am both self-centered and poetically vulgar. ‘Tis’ is Shakespearian dialogue, technically.
-I have been trying to make a navigation bar/categorization, but due to a crippling fear of manuels, attempts have been unsuccessful.
-As for commenting, sometimes the person has said everything to be said in the actual post, and I have flashbacks of when I write (what I think was) very well-though out and (frankly) awesome articles, and nobody left comments, which crushed my fourteen-year-old heart. I will try more meaty ones, then.
-Should I be using tags for my posts? I mean, they always go straight to the top of the post, which makes it kind of an eyesore, but it might help with navigation a bit, I guess.
-I can’t do paragraphs. School-taught pressure to make MLA formatted, five paragraphs, ten-to-twenty sentences each…sometimes, I can’t do paragraphs, because I don’t have enough thoughts on the subject. I’ll try to bulls**t a bit, if it’ll help.
-Thank you, all nay sayers. I will get on it, maybe. Content and sidebar, at least.
(I will be crying and regretting giving people this option now)
(not really)
(yes really)
(…)
I would definitely suggest using tags; it’s a great way for search engines to plug your site.
Feel free to keep commenting with single sentences on my blog! Haha. Also, I too sort of like the bullet reviews, sometimes it’s easier to read and digest when organized as such. Just my opinion though.
Personally I don’t care about layout and know nothing about it so it don’t bother with it unless some technical wizard wanted to help me with it. I have nothing new at add and Castor really did a good job at offering valuable points so I’ll just disagree with one thing he said and back up a few more.
First, keep writing in first person. Third person criticism is not criticism, it’s someone trying to pass their own personal experience of a movie off as fact. Film reviews should not be bland content checklists but an account of your personal experience of a film. HOw can one express that in the third person? If anything, I’d like you to put more of yourself into your reviews.
The big thing I’d agree with Castor on is the language. To be honest, more often than not, it turns me off. Not just you but anywhere. It cheapens whatever you may have been saying and it’s just lazy writing. I know I had to edit quite a bit of it out for the Greatest Movies…list because I don’t like it on my site unless it is quoting dialogue. You may be 14, but that doesn’t mean you need to write like it.
I also agree with the one line comments. It’s nice to know your reading, but the comments, in my mind, are for debating the ideas put on display not saying hey, thumbs up, even though, yes, that’s nice to hear from time to time.
Other than that you’re doing good work.
Thanks for the great input Mike. I’m in the school of thought that the use of the first person should not be excessive. It’s definitely fine to use it from time to time to give credibility to what you are writing but if used in every sentence, it just becomes “me me me!”
I, for one, actually like the bulletpoint reviews. If that’s all you have to say about a movie, then there is no point in wasting space/time/reader’s attention bullshitting about some movie.
I don’t dig the idea of making this a regular feature. I commented a lot to earn this, and I think it should be something that is a privilege not a right. Plus doing this often kind of steals thunder from the LAMB who does this pretty frequently.
This isn’t a regular feature Marshall, Ripley won the contest and she chose a blog review. Yours will come sometime next week, possibly Tuesday btw.
I know it’s not a regular feature, but at the end you alluded to the fact that it could be one. I just think a blog review should be earned by consistently commenting, not just by requesting.
Oh gotcha. Just a remnant from an older post lol
I like the Blogroll that features everyone’s last post
i think that is neato
Yes, nice addition but I would cut down the amount of blogs in it as the left sidebar is now stretching way past the main column lol
You people are impossible to please.
Mentions of the banner have already been made. It doesn’t have to be fancy, even Kai’s and Will from The Film Reel just continually change something from movies they are currently have affairs with. It’s just something to catch the eye and set you apart for those people that are browsing, not people that know who you are and already think your writing is sexified. Visually the gray is kind of drab also, and it doesn’t seem the layout either gives you many options to modify it which makes that sidebar way too long (I suffer from the same problem of having too much info).
The content is good though some of the polls seem irrelevant and out of place. There is no pages to read an about you, no review archive, no search button, no recent comments so people can see who’s talking about what, and if not a recent posts would be lovely.
These are just suggestions that would be helpful for people to experience your blog more fully. Before I ever commit to regularly reading someones blog, I discover if I like their writing and content, but I also explore more about their blog rather than just the top five posts. It gives you a better feel for the writer and the blogs intention.
and the sense of humor surrounding it is my favorite part. Humor is the way to my heart though.
and um, the reason I may not get the polls is I don’t get the mustache inside joke? humor?
This is the reason an about you or your blog page is necessary. I would then be able to chuckle with you about the mustache, lack of mustache, mustache murder??????
I fear I’m lost.
I dunno, I wanted to make a new poll, but I couldn’t think of anything. The poll I have now kind of follows a plot, I guess, as I was thinking about the apocalypse or something like that.
About me? I’m so uninteresting. Accept the mystery, you serious man, you.
I’m having a very puny week. Excuse me.
Anyways, I had a recent posts bar, but I got rid of it for the blogroll, I have not a clue how to present comments, a search button would require me to go through my entire archive and give them tags, which, um, no, I do have some semblance of shit to do, and anyway, I’m trying to find a good design to replace mine with, or at least a new color, but anyway, I don’t want to clutter the sidebar up anymore.
Though, if some one could tell me how to seperate things by general idea (Reviews, news, etc.), I would be eternally grateful to you sirs.
You would use labels to separate things
Label all the movie reviews “reviews for example.
No…well, yeah…forget it, this is exhausting. I’ll find a new template, maybe.
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