I have been tracking justafreak for a little while now. They had found a loophole with the voting system and managed to get a near perfect reader score, while having nearly 4,400 reader votes. That is what first lead me to justafreak.
The first thing that loads is a flash intro. Yay, an elaborate splash page. Ok, the flash thing was pretty cool and had good music, so I won’t take off points for that. But then after that is done loading, I am greeted with another splash page! Not one, but two splash pages. Seriously what is the purpose in doing that? We all know how I feel about splash pages.
So I finally get to the main page and it isn’t the blog like normal. There is a nice design and it has a welcome message along with some news. The navigation can be found on the left with a tiny interface that has all the links, or at the bottom in standard text link mode.
Now I am to the blog and I find an interesting blog. Its close to your standard blog with the types of entries (Friday Five, feelings about a girl, Friends…) but yet is unique in its own way. You can actually tell that there is an individual voice behind the words.
One of the more interesting features the site has is a restricted page. You need to figure out what the username and password are, but they are in a blog entry. Not too hard to figure out if you have heard riddles before. The only thing the restricted area has is a blog decoder key which lets you decode certain blog entries. These entries are a little more personal and he only wants people that are smart enough to actually read them.
Over all I have to give justafreak a 3.0 for a couple of reasons. The fact that I had to go through 3 different pages just to access the blog was a bit much for me. 2 splash pages is not a cool thing in my opinion. Also the design while good is somewhat hard to navigate and would be even harder if not for the text links. But the writing is good and the entries are good and that is what matters.
justafreak