Review: Web Mash

With Technically Easy I try to write posts that are both informational as well as helpful. I am a more serious blog as compared to other blogs. There are many types of blogs that people have authored, informational, personal, witty, or funny, as is the case with Web Mash.

It is nice to just get away from the pressures of life and just kick back and laugh and just have fun, and that is just what this blog provides.

Update: The Web Mash blog has since been removed, so I have removed all the links from this post.

Design 

The design of Web Mash is a fairly simple design with a single left navigation bar and then the main content page. The title of the blog is simple and pushed into the upper left corner. It took some time for me to see that and know that click the title is how to get back to the home page. The reason for that is the images in the content captured my eyes first.

The font family and font size chosen for the blog is nice and large and easy to read. If you have trouble reading small fonts, you should have no problem reading this blog. It is sometimes rare to find a blog with such large fonts that are even larger than the fonts on Technically Easy.

The colours chosen for the blog are as a simple as the layout of the blog. Purple and black are really the only two colours used in the blog for all the text. The background is white so the text stands out clearly.

The design of the blog overall was nice and simple, but at times it looked plain because of the simplicity. I found navigating around very easy to do.

Focus 

When I get requests to write a review for a blog or Web site I also ask for a description of the blog. In this case receiving the description helped to understand the blog.

The content of Web Mash is simply a mix of photos, videos, Web sites, and stories that the author has discovered on the Web. The mix of items that comprise the various posts can hide the focus of the blog making it hard to understand what the author is attempting to show you.

For myself, I had the advantage of receiving the description to help understand the focus. To help visitors to understand the focus of the blog, the author should include a short description at the top of the blog, something that expands on the one that is already there. Although, once you start navigating and viewing some of the content, the focus does become more apparent.

Content 

The old saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words” can sometimes be true on this blog. As mentioned previously, many of the posts contain photos and images found on the Web. The only problem with these posts is that is sometimes all that is contained in the post.

There are many posts that contain no text description. While sometimes the pictures can explain more than words can, it would be nice if the author spent time to add a few words. Many of the posts do, however, contain a one paragraph extract that begins the post. The pictures can be quite large so those with a slow connection may experience a long load time.

For those that wonder where the author retrieves the images and videos from, they have also included a link to that item on the Web. This is a nice touch as it let’s the visitor also view the Web site themselves without having to search for it.

When I view the archives, I notice that the blog is a very young blog. Don’t let this fool you, however, as the author contributes many posts a day to the blog. There is easily over 150 posts already available to view on the blog, and from the number of posts a day that are posted, there will easily be 150 more posts within a month.

While looking over some of the posts, I noticed that several had missing images. As mentioned earlier with regards to the lack of content on some posts, the posts without any images were not very descriptive.

The content overall was lacking in words, but not in pictures. You will need to read the titles of each post to determine what the author is intending to tell you within the post.

Spelling and Grammar 

With regards to spelling and grammar, there were few mistakes in both cases within the blog. The author has obviously taken the time to check their spelling and grammar within their posts, at least the posts that have text.

The only issue that I had found was capitalizing the first letter in a post. Some posts begin with a lowercase letter to start a paragraph, however, this doesn’t take away from the readability of the post.

Overall 

I enjoyed reading through some of the posts and viewing the images that are available on Web Mash. Adding a short description of the blog as well as adding some more textual information with each post will greatly improve the blog. I like the nice simple layout and easy to read font that can sometimes be rare in blogs, especially where authors tend to squeeze every inch of real estate out of the Web page.