Blog Review: FanaticSpace
2xKnight offered up two blogs for reviews and at first I thought about combining them. Then I took a look at the first one, FanaticSpace, and decided it wasn't a good course of action. Before I looked at even at one article, I saw a problem.
I know that 2xKnight has heavily modified this theme, a theme he obtained from another source. The credits in the footer didn't give it away, even though I eventually made my way down there. I don't have multiple browsers on my computer — I only use Internet Explorer and Firefox. Anyway, as I viewed this blog with my widescreen display in Firefox, I noticed the sidebar was below the content. Thinking that it might be a Firefox display issue, I fired up Internet Explorer to take a look. Same thing. I then reduced my window to 1024×768 in Internet Explorer and everything lined up right. I did the same thing with Firefox and it still didn't line up on the left like it should. This theme needs some work. At least there's an "about" page and a "contact" page. Wait… something odd is going on. I refreshed in Internet Explorer in the 1024×768 size and it looked right. No go in Firefox though.
About that "about" page. Skimming through it, like I normally do when I don't want to read a lot, I saw that it's a blog targeted at fans of anime, video games , movie, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, books, music, comics and finally, television. There are forums set up for these topics, but the content on the forums looked pretty sparse. Looking at the page rank and Alexa rank for both the main site and the blog, I noticed that it's not ranking well. I think the theme has a lot to do with that. The blog gets comments, so there's a following of some sort. Odd, though, because it's been online for about 13 months.
I don't have time to be a fanatic really, but I was curious and looked at some posts in the dragoncon category. I didn't have the desire to follow the source link he provided to the convention, but it was interesting to see his note in 175 days to Dragon*Con of who some of the famous guests will be. Looking through subsequent articles on the topic, it seems the convention will take place in a few short days. I don't know where and at what time, but that's just me showing my lack of interest in conventions.
Perhaps 2xKnight puts more effort into the other blog. I won't know that until I get to it. I think this one could do a lot better if the theme is fixed or replaced and more time is put into regular postings. It looks kind of sporadic right now. The content is fine as is — I just think there needs to be more of it and more on a regular basis.
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You had me so curious on this review that I had to go look for myself. Thirteen months. Not much going on over there. I'm not the guru that you are, but he should be doing more by now. I agree with your assessment. Have a great weekend RT.
Thanks for the review. I'm going to try to fix some of the problems you listed.
I had no idea there was a problem in widescreen. I'll do what I can to get this taken care of.
[...] review isn't great either. Well, the blog review itself is fine, my results were bad. It turns out that the site has more problems than I was aware [...]
Yeah, I need to work on post frequency. There is a reason for the slow production though, at least in the beginning. The blog was really an after thought. I added it to take care of site news, announcements and such. It wasn't intended to be a blog. The main focus of the site was supposed to be the other pages. You can see that in the other pages. The site news in the sidebars are blog feeds from the news category.
When I saw what Wordpress could do, I tried to shift focus. Not having any blogging experience, I've been trying to learn while doing this.
If I were starting today with what I've learned, I'd use Wordpress as a CMS. I'd put it in the main directory. I'd build up the post count before opening it.
Once again I want to thank RT for the review. It really got me thinking about what I've done and what I should have done.