Reviewing+blogs

Introduction
It is important to be able to review blogs against a range of differerent criteria (shown below). For example, a blog might be visually stunning, but the content might be uninteresting. Or the blog could be really well written, but it is only updated once every couple of months.

Assessment Task
Choose one blog from each of the 5 categories (personal journal, community blog, corporate blog, political blog, special interest blog). You should already have added 3 blogs from each category to your blog aggregator in the blog categories task.

For each of the **5 blogs** selected, download and complete this Blog Review Pro Forma.

Save, print and give a copy to your teacher.

Review criteria
When reviewing a blog, it is important to consider the following criteria:


 * Design**
 * How does the blog look?
 * Is it visually appealing, plain or a complete mess?
 * Is the style consistent across the entire blog?
 * Are colours complimentary?
 * Is the layout simple, and not cluttered?
 * Is the font easy to read?


 * Usability**
 * How easy is the blog to use?
 * Are blog post titles clear and interesting?
 * Does the blog allow comments?
 * Is it possible to subscribe to the blog?
 * Does the blog have an about page?
 * Does each post have related post links at the bottom?


 * Navigation**
 * Is the site easy to navigate?
 * Do links go where they are supposed to go?
 * Does the blog have top level menus for different sections?
 * Does the site have a top posts / most popular posts section?


 * Collaboration**
 * Does the blog site have more than one author?


 * Links**
 * Do blog posts have as many links as possible?
 * Are there places where a link would be helpful but it is missing?


 * Quality of information**
 * Are posts informative?
 * Do posts give accurate information?
 * Are posts short and to the point?


 * Use of multimedia**
 * Are appropriate images embedded?
 * Are video clips embedded?
 * Are audio files embedded?


 * Topicality**
 * Is the content of the blog current, relevant and up-to-date?


 * Frequency of updates**
 * Is the blog update frequently or infrequently?


 * Archiving**
 * Does the blog create an archive of older posts for reading?