Gadget Advisor Review

Disclaimer; This is a paid review however not influenced by the fact it is paid. It is of my own, honest opinion.

Gadget Advisor is a new gadget blog which aims to bring you the most useful / interesting / coolest news in the gadget category. Rather than post every bit of breaking news on a daily basis, Gadget Advisor aims to cherry pick the quality stuff and not overload you with too many posts.

If any of you are subscribed to techcrunch, mashable, engadget etc… you’ll know that these blogs have multiple writers and at times the amount of new content coming online can be overwhelming. If you don’t read one of those for a few days you could have missed 30/40 new posts which is really annoying as we humans don’t like to miss anything, we don’t like missing out.

So there is, perhaps, a space for Gadget Advisor although this is a very saturated area online and improvements will have to be made before it can start holding on to readers. I’ve picked out 4 areas which i think have to be changed/improved;

Time & Date

The posts on the blog aren’t stamped with a date or time. This is basic blogging etiquette… a blog is a diary and people expect a date and time with all posts. It’s not even up for debate - all posts must be ‘timestamped’ on a blog if there is lots of new content being added regularly.

Who is this?

Readers also expect to see an author name somewhere on the blog as it makes the connection between blogger & reader more personal. On Gadget Advisor i don’t know who writes the posts. Whilst this isn’t essential for me, it would probably make Gadget Advisor a more welcoming place if i could attach a face and name to it.

As a reader i don’t want  a life story but just a basic blurb about the person/people behind the content and why as a reader, i should listen to them - are they tech addicts, are they working in the industry, are they just regular people doing this as a hobby? I don’t mind what they are, but not disclosing any of that makes me ‘wary’ as a reader…

Blocks of text

If i look at an article with no paragraphs, no pictures and large chunks of text, my eyes want to press the self-distruct button. A few months ago, i made a conscious effort to clean up this blog and start adding pictures to all posts and generally try to increase the visual appeal of all posts. Content is king, yes… but if content looks bad, the shallow people who go for looks will overlook you

If we take this Best extensions for Firefox posts and compare it with Google Cache Checker Firefox extension, which would you rather read or more to the point which you rather not read? The latter is much more visually attractive as it has paragrahps, a nice big picture to break up the text plus it’s short and sweet. The former post is not short and sweet - the content is good and useful (yes), but the way it’s presented is torture for my eyes.

Thumbnails

On the homepage, 4 posts have a thumbnail attached to them. That thumbnail is the same for all 4 posts. It’s the same story in any of the category pages. The whole point of a thumbnail is to give a small preview of what the post is about, but if all thumbnails are the same and set as default, it doesn’t relate to the actual posts or help me determine what the post is about.

I like to see updated, varied thumbnails which give me some indication as to what the post is about. The Blaze Media Pro review post is what i like to see - big, bold images which tell me straight away what the post is about.

Conclusion

So basically, what i’m saying is that Gadget Advisor needs to work on getting it’s content seen more. The content (posts) themselves are generally short and sweet which i like. But the way the content is displayed and lack of connection between blogger & reader really needs to be worked on if Gadget Advisor is to move forward.