My first impression of this site was that it was a fairly run of the mill, fairly average weblog with nothing that would provide much of a challenge for me.
I have to say that my first impression was right, astonishingly right in fact. The site design is (I guess) taken from a template. If it isn’t taken from a template then it is certainly very simple in terms of visual design, being simply plain dark blue throughout. Yes, it is easy to read (the main requirement in blog design if you ask me) but not really anymore than that.
There are a few “novelty” gizmos to be found on the site, which didn’t really enhance the content much – for example each post could be spoken orally by some kind of speech program via Windows Media Player (at least on my browser). Admittedly very useful for the blind or illiterate, but I suspect there are not many of these people who visit the site, and the speech was too artificial and stilted for regular readers to use the feature often. There was also a webcam which was switched off when I visited. Also included on the front page were various buttons, none of which I found it necessary to use – “email this post” for example.
There were a number of links to other sites – Google seemed popular, a few other blogs and something called GGSearch, which I didn’t really understand, or appreciate the relevance of.
As for the content, well, yes there were archives going back to May, but May only had one post and June a mere 3. Comments were there and had been made use of. Most of the subject matter covered the Californian political situation in great depth and a few other religious/ general news stories.
There were some quite nice posts about the author’s life and general bio information, but I would have liked to have read more of these and in greater depth. I gather the author is involved with the church, is training to be a teacher and possibly homosexual (at least according to June 2). These things would have been much more interesting to read about than whether Arnie is running for Governor.
There were links to the author’s home page which contained a few photos but not much other revealing information, as well as a forum which contained four posts, none longer than a line.
If I could give some advice to the author, it would be to spend more time writing some content and less time on gadgets. Including the photos of the family gatherings in the main blog (or at least linking to them) may also have helped fill out the gaps a bit more.