Reviews

If you are looking for some tips and tricks on how to live a little more frugally, then you may want to check out Bird on a Wire, the definitive guide to frugal living. It is largely a blog about finances.  The bloggers is a life advisor that teaches others how to identify values, banish debt, start saving, and begin investing.  The blogger aims to teach you how to budget and how living frugally doesn’t necessarily mean you are living on the streets.  To learn more about this blogger and this blog, check out their most recent bloggeries: Updates from Remarkable Bloggers, Breadcrumbs, Confession is Good for the Soul, Niche Me Once, Finally Friday, Dancing Backwards in High Heels, and Common Sense Makes Cents.

The blog is very well organized and comes in a clean well-laid out template which makes it easy to navigate.  Bloggeries are in black text on white background, all placed on a backdrop of beige background with links highlighted in red.  The blog offers several navigation systems, both a top and a bottom navigation system containing the same links to Home, About Us, Contact Us, Network, Privacy, Disclosure, and SERO.  Bloggeries are left marginalized and there is a double wide right navigation bar on the right.  At the top of this system is a convenient search bar where you can search the Archives and Categories Menu as well as the blog itself, followed by some advertising, Recent Posts Menu, and Blog Directory buttons.  The navigation system then switches into two bars where the right bar contains blog stats and advertising, and the left bar contains Great Sites menu, Remarkable bloggers, Top Blog Sites, and We Read These menu.  Each bloggery is accompanied by at least one relevant picture making the blog colorful and interesting to read, and each bloggery is also associated with a Related Posts Links menu where readers can access similar information on the blog.

This blog gets a 4.8/5 for me as it scores well on all accounts.  The blog is easy to read with well-written content that has both a personal voice and user friendly tone for its tips.  The content is also coming in at a nice steady pace with daily regular content.  Further, the overall appearance of the blog is appealing, with a lot of information and graphics that are managed well so that they are not distracting.  The blog is well organized into a variety of navigations systems that make reading this blog not only easy, but enjoyable. This is a great blog on a unique topic that will sure to see some steady growth and success.

-Chrissie

If you are one of those that have always wondered if those paid surveys actually do pay out to the user, then you may want to have a look at this blog related to Online Paid Surveys.  The purpose of this blog is pretty straightforward, and if you are looking for any information at all about online paid surveys, you should have no problem finding it on this blog.  The blog consists almost entirely of reviews on the various survey programs, and you can see this for yourself by looking at any of the most recent bloggeries:  Geenfield Online adds PayPal and Other Improvements, Earn Money Blogging for Online-Paid-Surveys.net, Make Money Taking Surveys – I Did It And You Can Too!, Share Your Thoughts on Online Income Opportunities and Test Your Stock Trading Skills with Wall Street Survivor.

The site has a fairly clean layout and thus from first appearances navigation will be fairly simple.  The more time you spend on the blog however you will find this blog to be somewhat disorganized and chaotic.  Bloggeries are left marginalized and there is a right sided navigation bar.  There is also a top navigation system under the header.  Bloggeries are in black text on white background with the blog being bordered in black.  In the top navigation system you will find links to User Reviews Home, Free Paid Survey Directory, Survey Panel Blog, and Online-Paid-Surveys.net.  As you go further into the blog, you will notice that the blog becomes more complicated to navigate. In fact, the more time you spend here you will find this is more a website about survey sites, rather than an actual informative blog on survey sites.  In the right navigation bar you will find categories, top 10 user ralted lists, popular posts and surveys.

This blog scores a 2.4/5 at this point, as it has very little to offer the readers in terms of what a blog generally is supposed to offer.  From an appearance standpoint, the blog receives its highest score in the criteria, as the blog has a clean template with very little distractions.  On all other fronts however, the blog does not do well at the time of review.  The content on this blog is lacking, period, in the sense that there really is no content.  Each bloggery is a review of a survey site, with no personal voice or information attached to the bloggery that would lend the blog credibility to the reader.  The overall navigation of not only the bloggeries, but the blog as a whole needs some work.   As a whole in fact, the blog looks like a website geared to advertise survey site referral links.  Anyone can go to a site with tones of links to different surveys. The secret is making interesting content that will not only draw people looking for surveys to the site but also give them some selection when there so they feel as though they are at a quality resource on the topic of online paid surveys. If the author ads more content in a major way and does an actual indepth writeup of pros and cons of each survey online this blog would do much better. There are lot’s of people actively searching to do surveys for money online; with some work this could be a quality resource; already has the domain!

-Chrissie

If you have ever tried to quit smoking, or are in the midst of it now, then you may want to stop in and have a look at the Reformed Smoker blog.  The Reformed Smoker is a blog run by a former smoker who has just recently quit his 20 years, 20-a day smoking habit.  The blogger is hoping the blog will anchor him in his quest to quit smoking, and will hopefully provide some focus for him as he works on the reformed aspect of the reformed smoker.  The blogger has quit smoking using the “Cold Turkey” method, and at the time of review, had been going strong for 63 days.  Find out what is going on in the mind of this reformed smoker, as he battles this quit and writes his recent bloggeries:  Insane in the Brain, Living Colour, Get Your Skates On, Their Or There, Sixty, Open House, Lock up the Fags, Merry Christmas, Bloody Certifiable, Orange Crush, and Tripple Pizza.

The blog is a personal blog of sorts and is laid out as such, offering a nice clean layout and organization to the blog that makes navigation easy.  Bloggeries are written in black text on a beige almost yellow background and links stand out nicely in red.  Most bloggeries are associated with relevant pics.  Bloggeries are left marginalized, and there is a right-sided navigation bar.  In the right-sided navigation bar you will find buttons for contact or subscribing to the feeds, About page for Reformed Smoker, Search bar for Reformed Smoker, Countback Widget (to last cigarette), Widget to create your own quit smoking certificate, Video of the Week, Gym Activity Tracker, and Archive Menu that also lists Recent Posts within the current month’s archives.

This blog gets a 3.5/5 overall at this point, and I think that score is largely due to the fact that the blog is quite young.  The blog has a certain essence of sparsity to it, as if there is something missing, but I think as the blog grows this will change.  The blog scores well for content and for activity, as the bloggeries are written in a clean personal voice that connects with the readers well.  The activity is very consistent as well with bloggeries coming in every day at this point.  The navigation scores could be improved, and would be if there was more ‘blog meat’ in the navigation bar.  If the blogger added a recent comments menu for example it may encourage more comments from the readers, but also I think a Categories Menu would improve navigation on this blog.  The appearance scores are being affected strictly due to the lack of content and blog meat in the blog at this point.  Also, the main page of the blog only has one bloggery listed on it, if the blogger added more bloggeries to be shown when the blog loads the blog would look a little more beefed up. Overall however, this is a fun blog to read, and if you are one about to join, or in the trenches, of the battle in quitting smoking, this blog may add some company to your misery.

-Chrissie