The next blog I am reviewing is entitled What's Alan Watching and it is a place where Alan Sepinwall, the TV critic for The Star-Ledger discusses the television shows he watches every week.
Layout: The blog is not cluttered with advertisements mainly because it was created using Blogger. Also the posts are easy to locate because they are in a column centered in the middle of the page. However the blog's background is white which is a problem because it makes the text on the page especially the links faint and unreadable at times. Despite this the blog has a nice feature in the right hand column where Alan lists all the shows he watches and they are linked to blog pages where all the posts focus on one TV show like Chuck.
Writing: The writing on the site is very eloquent with no typos which comes from the blog's author being a professional writer. The fact that Alan Sepinwall is a TV critic puts some legitimacy behind his opinions such as the new show Community relying on their characters to create jokes instead of pop culture references because obviously his profession requires Sepinwall to be an expert on the television industry.
Content: The content on this page stays focused on one thing Alan giving his opinions on the TV shows he is watching and he never strays away. He is also very timely about posting his opinions on shows he watches before each new episode to give the people reading the blog the experience of watching TV with Alan. The only problem is Alan watches too much TV meaning that he goes more in depth with his opinions on some shows more so than others.
Media: As for media there are no videos on the site but each post Alan makes about an episode of a TV show contains a screen-shot from that particular episode. Alan also does a good job of making sure the information he has in his posts are backed up with hyperlinks but as I said before the white background makes the links hard to read. At the same time Alan tries to encourage interactivity by allowing visitors to see his Twitter updates and leaving his posts opened ended to entice readers to leave comments. He also has interviews with people who work on the shows he is watching to make up for the lack of video on the blog.
Final Thought: What's Alan Watching is a great place for people to get direction on what to watch on TV but if you need the opinion of more than one blogger I would encourage you to check out TV Squad.
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Getting better. You use evaluative criteria--but hide it. Headings would help. Or, different fonts. Or, something. Make your content more easily scanned.
ReplyDeleteAlso you mention visual criteria, but don't exemplify. Show more.