The site I will be reviewing belongs to Aryst from Nimrodjo.com. For each review, I will be referring to the author in third person, as though I am speaking to an audience (because I technically am). So for a reference, this isn’t only directed towards the author of the blog, but also anyone else reading this. Now as a bit of a disclaimer, I did work with Aryst on his website earlier, and we worked on a few bits and pieces of the website. However, I will try to go into as much detail as possible to give you a good idea of what should be looked at. By doing this review, I am not making the changes mandatory, but simply offering suggestions based off of personal experiences, opinions, and good judgment. The magnitude of which you take each observation is determined by you.

Presentation

Your page looks very active. That is a good thing. I like how you have the three columns (2 sidebars and the body of the page). However, articles could get a bit saturated within the “plug” plugins. The “Plugs” options, the “Sphinn it” button, and the “Share This” link may be a bit much. Think about it - you have your audience. You may get 100 hits per day, but how many people read your articles? Let’s say 75% read your articles, but 20% of that 75% are passionate about your website. So that leaves 14 people who have the RSS feed hooked in, have your page bookmarked, and will come back again and again to check for updates (this figure is actually a very inflated and optimistic one). Realistically, you may have 5 people who actually want to put forth the effort to share your blog with others.

So let’s put this in perspective. How many hits do you get with the “Plug” button? How many do you get from del.ico.us? Every bit of content that hinders your articles takes a piece with it. I understand this when I post my Google ads up, but every once in a while, someone clicks it and I make a (small) profit. Now look at it this way - if I get a .5% CTR on my Google ads, how much would you want to bet that the profit comes from the single Plugim click? I’m not necessarily saying you should eliminate the button from your site. In all honesty, posting those buttons increases accessibility and usability for those tools. However, Plugim has a very small community. Del.ico.us has a large community, but is hindered by other factors (which I will cover in the next section). If Plugim is producing results, what do you think a Digg button would produce? Digg’s community is almost exponentially larger than Plugim’s. Just something to consider.

I think you could easily get rid of a lot of your links at the bottom-left hand corner of your page. Many websites only make you post that for verification. Unless you are passionate about them, I think removing them would help your page load time a bit. I think the style of your website works, but I think you need to change your colors a bit to really make the title stand out. When I first came to your website, I didn’t know what to expect. Put something in your header that really characterizes your website - whether it is about your life, your point of view on business, etc. People like niches.

Technical

Your website works. Step 1 complete. Step 2… does it work well? No. Your website loads like a salted slug. In other words, it is painfully slow. Remember when I said you needed to eliminate some images that may be slowing the load down? Yeah… I’ll let you figure out what I meant by that. I think that your load time is the #1 thing that hurts your website. I have tried loading your page on several different internet connections (… let’s just say I borrowed them for a few minutes!) and it is mind-numbing. I have a pretty quick connection, too (3MB down 250kbps up). For the love of all that is material, immaterial, and unknown - get a better host! The main factor that keeps me from visiting your site every day is the load time. There was a study done on how long it takes people to give up on web pages because of long loading times - I don’t know what that number is… but you exceed it by about 25 seconds.

Your meta descriptions are not descriptive.
Your meta keywords are lacking.

Jump into the world of PHP with Wordpress and figure out how to improve your descriptions and keywords. There are plugins you can download for this.

Your site does not validate either, which will hurt your search engine listings.

Monetization

I’m not sure if you want to monetize your website, but your ads aren’t obvious. There is so much happening on your page that I become disinterested in what your links even say. The important part of advertising is to get them to stand out. Your ads blend in. My suggestion? Bring a few up to the top. Put them in obvious places.

The Lo-Down

-Reduce page clutter by removing some of the unnecessary links off to the sides of your page
-Fix metas
-Reconsider utility of the reference buttons
-Improve page load time (get a new host)
-Change some colors (the title font color really almost blends with its background)
-Fix some website validation issues

Conclusion

I have some bias towards you, Aryst. You’ve been on this site from the beginning. I don’t intend on losing you as a visitor of this site, so if there is anything else you want to know I would be honored to help you out (and I hope this reciprocates!). I think you have some great articles. You write some great articles, you find great articles, and I think your site has a bright future. However, you need to pay much attention to detail! Many of your issues lie in the Technical section, which worries me. That is the hardest section to correct. New hosting will cost money. I don’t know how well you can connect to your site in Malaysia, but over 50% are from the United States and elsewhere. Maybe they are having the same, long load times. To reiterate, too - shorten your title or use some spaces, man! People with low resolution will see a deformed front page!

Overall Rating
4/10
Main factor: LOAD TIMES!

Note: Content is not a factor in ratings. Aryst writes some great articles and you all need to check them out. The overall rating is based purely on everything analyzed above.