Blog Reviews by Bloggeries » Finance – Credit and Loans

Florida Mortgage Blogger – Review

chrissie — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:12:32 +0000

If you live in the state of Florida, and are having troubles getting financing for your dream home, you may want to check out the Florida Mortgage Blogger. Here you will find the blog written by Kevin, a Mortgage Professional in Florida who has as his life mission to ‘help good people achieve their Florida Home Loan goals’. Kevin’s blog is all about serving the people of Florida, and you can get a good feel for this through his header which states he is ‘building better relationships one step at a time’. Kevin’s work is focused on the Winter Haven, Florida area, and he works both with clients and real estate agents as you will see on his blog. He has been in the mortgage industry for two years now, and works to assist clients in obtaining financing that meets their unique requirements. He does so by primarily working with FHA and VA loan programs to offer more flexible and affordable options in mortgage loans. You can see this for yourself through any of Kevin’s most recent bloggeries: Weekly Winter Haven Mortgage Rate Report: February 9, 2009; Home Buyers Are on the Move as Rates Stay Low and Pending Sales Rise; Would You Buy a Home for $15,000?; FL Mortgage Rates Finally Hit Bottom?; and Winter Haven Sees Lower Mortgage Rates After Geithner’s Speech.

This blog is set up more like a business website than a blog, and thus is missing some blog meat that is making the blog a little cumbersome to navigate. Bloggeries are centralized with both left and right sided navigation bars with a lot of information on Florida Home Loans. In the top navigation bar you can find standard links to the About Page and Home page. The left navigation bar will give you subscription information as well as a Recent Comments Menu and Yahoo widget showing you how many Yahoo links the blog has. In the right sided navigation bar, you will find Contact Information, and a form you can fill out to get onto Kevin’s mailing list, as well as a Pages Menu. In the Pages Menu you will find links to the About Page, Interviews and Podcasts, Orlando, Florida area, Testimonials, and a link to subscribe by Email. Bloggeries are primarily textual with a few pictures and charts within the bloggeries, so you get a strong business sense from the blog’s presentation.

This blog gets a 3.4/5 at the time of review, and needs a few tweaks to look more like a blog and less like a business page. Activity is up to date, so this blog scores well on how it feeds the search engines and meets the needs of its readers. Is the blog for loan clients or for real estate agents? For realtors, terms and language used on this blog would be useful, but the average home owner to-be is not familiar with terms such as ‘Absorption Rates’ and the like. Sales reports mean little to the home owner, but would be useful for the real estate agent. Content needs to be ‘dumbed down’ for the average Internet reader perhaps. Some relevant pictures, perhaps of homes for sale in the area, would speak to prospective home owners and add some meaning to the bloggeries for them. And regardless of who the blog is targeted to, essential blog items such as a Categories Menu and Recent Posts Menu would make this blog much easier to navigate and look more like an information resource on the topic. This blog is off to a great start as far as reaching the real estate market, but needs some tweaks in terms of user friendliness if it is trying to reach as many potential prospects as possible.

-Chrissie

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Money Moose Blog Review

chrissie — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:44:12 +0000

We all love to laugh at our finances once in a while (don’t we?) and this next blog is a good outlet for that. This blog is called Money Moose. Money Moose likes to be known as the money blog for real professionals, and is self-professed to be the number one non-financially skilled financial advisor in the world. As the blogger himself will tell you, many have referred to Money Moose as a parody site, but the blogger says that was is required to be a parody site (funny, jokes, and many page views) can not be found at Money Moose. Money Moose takes itself seriously, and ranks itself with The Wall Street Journal and CNN Money despite the fact that Money Moose is bringing in 600 page views a day. However, along with some humor you will be sure to find quality content in money, business, and finance, as well as some good investing guides at Money Moose. Go and see this for yourself by reading any of their most recent bloggeries: The 101 Dumbest Business Moments, Frugal Living EXTREME! 16: Financial Advisors, About that Tuna You’re Eating, The Customer Is (n’t) Always Right, Frugal Living EXTREME! 14: Shampoo, November News of the Moose, and Guerilla Job Recruitment Techniques.

The blog is very neatly organized, and this makes it very easy to navigate. Bloggeries are centralized in black text on white background and links and menu borders are in a light blue. The blog has both a left and right navigation system, as well as a top navigation bar. In the top navigation bar you will find links to Home, About the Moose, Advertising on MoneyMoose, and Contact forms and information. In the left navigation menu you will find a Pages Menu offering again these same links from the Top Menu, Categories Menu, Recent Posts Menu, and an ad for Entrecard Business Card. The categories menu is not large, but comprehensive for the topic and contains sections such as Financial News, Frugal Living EXTREME, Irresponsible Investing, Miscellaneous, and Money Quick Tips. In the right navigation menu you will find subscription options, Sponsor the Moose link, Valued Associates Menu (aka blogroll), Recent Comments Menu, and an Archives menu indicating the blog is just hitting the three month old mark.

Overall I am going to give this blog a 4, which is an excellent score considering it is so young. But the blog is very well done, professionally laid out in a clean easy template that makes it easy to read. The blog is organized nicely within this template that makes finding all of the blog meat very easy, and thus, easy to navigate. Content scores well as it is fresh and unique content written well and very clever humor. The activity is the only thing I would suggest improving at this point. The first two months of blogging looked fairly consistent, but the blogger has only brought in 8 posts in December. I would suggest the blogger bring in a little more consistency to not only keep the readership active, but also to bring in more traffic. Overall however the blog is doing well with an excellently established readership which can only improve as the blog grows.

-Chrissie

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Silver Monthly – Silver Investing – Bloggeries Review

chrissie — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 11:13:03 +0000

If money is of any interest to you, and who isn’t interested in money, then perhaps you want to stop in to Silver Monthly: Resource for Silver Investing. If you have a look at it, you will see just how right they probably are, it is a very comprehensive resource when it comes to the metal exchange system. This blog has sought information from several resources that will help you determine where silver fits into your modern portfolio. Any of their recent posts will give you an excellent idea as to how comprehensive this blog really is: A history of money and banking in the United States: Book Review; Silver Bearish Investor Vs. Silver Bullish Investors; Eight Rules for Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) Success; MAG Silver Corp. to List on the American Stock Exchange; Chicago Futures Markets Post Record Volume in June; Gold, Silver Futures Advance as Dollar Weakens Against the Euro, Silver Price to Remain High on Investor Interest, U.S. Gold Corp Should Gain on Shaky Dollar, and Silver Stocks Outperform Gold Stocks.

The navigation is very simple on this site, with posts being left marginalized and two right navigation bars. Appearance also is very simple and readable, with black text on blue columned backgrounds against a primary white background. The left-sided right navigation bar contains a links menu, stock quotes, metal prices and a search bar as well as the categories of “All”, “Silver Investing Articles”, “Silver News”, and “Books Reviewed”. You will also find a link to the Silver Forum if you are interested, as well as a menu for the Most Popular Posts which will give you information on how to survive mutual funds, and which companies and countries are the major producers of silver. On the right-sided navigation bar you will also find a comments menu and the recent posts links.

I am going with a 4 for this one. The only suggestions I would have would be to add some pictures to give a little oomph to the blog – even simple pictures of money or gold or silver. Also I really like to see an About page on blogs, even on ones as professional as this one. It gives the blog a voice and even a little bit as to how the blog came into fruition would be very interesting to the readers I think. On other accounts however, the blog scores excellently for superbly written content, very professional appearance, and efficient usability with the navigation system in place. I also thought the advertising was so well formatted, that it could probably even use a little more if it wants to without running the risk of distraction. Judging by the quality of the recent comments in the very organized comments menu, I think this blog has a good following. Given the way the market fluxes today however, it could probably pick up a few readers along the way with some of these suggestions. Overall, the blog is doing well though and is a very professional and easy read.

- Chrissie

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Credit – Debt – Personal Finance – Bloggeries Review

chrissie — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 14:56:02 +0000

If you are looking for some financial advice, you may want to have a look at a blog about credit, debt, and personal finance. This site offers chexsystems help and bad credit resources. The owner of the blog, Steve, wanted to create this blog as an all-in-one community where people could come to find helpful information and advice on credit and personal finance. He also hopes this blog will help people fulfill all of their financial needs such as personal finance and loans, credit cards, and mortgages. The site is pretty standard and fairly easy to use, and in fact even the most recent posts offer some very basic pointers and FAQ so to speak on financial terminology. Check out these most recent entries: Compounding Interest vs. Simple Interest, What makes up a FICO Score?, Agloco – Newest Money-Making Craze!, Last Read: Why We Want you to be Rich ( By Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki), How a Cash Advance can help your Credit, and Making Money Online with Google AdSense.

Navigation on this site is very simple. The posts are left marginalized with black text on white background. The posts have been fairly frequent lately, and this trend seems to have picked up over the last couple of weeks. There is a bit of a gap between April and June, tho June seems to be picking up the pace. There is a right sided navigation bar that contains both an archives menu, with archives going back to July 2006, so the site is not quite a year old yet. Below that is a categories menu where you will find categories such as banking, ChexSystems, Credit, Debt, Insurance, Making Money, Misc. Mortgage, Personal Loans, Real Estate, and Welcome posts. There is very little left to offer on the site outside of generic postings on finance related matters. The posting seems very relevant however and is well written and user friendly, easy to understand formats.

I am giving this site a 3 as it is lacking a few elements. I think this site needs just a little jumpstart to build a readership. The content is excellent, I love how user friendly it is, and it answers key questions that a lot of people just don’t know about yet. However, with the exception of the last week or so, activity has been sparse. The site could use some relevant pictures, even pictures of money or credit cards or something to get people a little more stirred up about the content. Navigation however is very easy, so no difficulties on that note. And I think that it needs something to make this blog stand out amongst all the other finance blogs, it is lacking some kind of pop that will tell its readers that this blog is the one to beat when it comes to financial matters. Perhaps some widgets, feed readers, that kind of thing would be enough to spunk it up a little.
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- Chrissie

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