Burak's Blog- Blog Review

Wait a minute... So you're telling me that this is literally a blog post about a Blogger blog that made a blog review of my blog? Talk about blog-ception!

My friend Burak, (a member of our collab YouTube channel "The AABO Show", recently made a post on his blog reviewing none other than my own blog, This and That, Here and There. You can see it here: http://biloglu.blogspot.com/2018/07/ttht-this-and-that-here-and-there-review.html#more

 Burak, thank you for the effort you put into reviewing my blog, and all the compliments you gave. Thank you for the advice, and even telling me the bad things about my blog as well. I will take all of what you said into consideration to make my blog better in the future. Specifically, I will post more often, especially during the summer (once a day is my slightly difficult goal), and I will make each post shorter than it would have been during the school year. Enough talking about my own blog, let's get into the purpose of this post: Reviewing Burak's Blog.

I will divide this review into five individual sections: Writing quality, topics, ease of navigation, visual appeal, and dedication. In each section, I will briefly discuss each aspect of his blog and give him a percentage score from 0 to 100 how I would rate that particular aspect. In the end, I will show the average of all five scores, and that will be my final overall score for the blog; a verdict.

Writing Quality 
Score: 96%

This is arguably the most important aspect of a blog: If the writing isn't any good, why even bother? Luckily, Burak's Blog aces this category quite well. His posts are decently engaging from start to finish, and keep the reader's attention more times than not. There are occasional grammatical errors, but they aren't obvious and don't make the writing unenjoyable to read. His writing style is short and concise; he gets straight to the point with all his posts. They are quite short, and I sometimes wish that he could put a bit more "meat on the bones" of his writing, but that doesn't mean he doesn't write enough; he writes just enough to get his point across. I mean, blogs are technically meant to be short anyway, just a quick little tidbit or idea. This is the closest I have seen to achieve that out of any of my friend's blogs (a stark contrast from my admittedly longer posts). The strongest thing about his posts are their bite-sized form. It is awesome being able to finish reading an entire post in just under 2 minutes! This is very beneficial for your readers; they can read a post quickly, enjoy it, and not have to waste any time out of their busy lives. Overall, I score his writing quality a 96/100.

Topics
Score: 97%

The best way to ensure that a wide variety of people will read your blog is to post about a wide variety of topics. Just focusing on one thing isn't bad, and can actually be the best way to blog if done correctly, but it limits your audience to just one group of people (for example, Nintendo fans). Burak has been blogging about a range of topics from travel, to Nintendo, to coding tutorials and more. While he does post about a range of things, he sure keeps more of a focus than my blog does (which you can't really blame me for, considering I have been doing this since third grade, so of course my interests have gradually evolved nearly five years later). While he does have a healthy variety of topics, he has a few focused audiences in mind: His close friends... or just "geeky" people in general. By "geeky", don't take it as a bad thing; this describes my blog as well. All that this simply means is, well, nerds would enjoy it. I mean, it has stuff about computer science, video games, and Star Wars, so it stands to reason that the "pop-culture obsessed young adult" would immediately come to mind as a target audience. His topics are similar to my blog at the moment, so I don't really have much to complain about here. He gets a solid 97/100 for this in my books.

Ease of Navigation
Score: 93%

An obvious characteristic of blogs that separates them from physical journals is the fact that they are online. All online webpages, blog or not, have a major component that decides whether or not a visitor will want to keep scrolling, or just press the red X tab button, and that is the site's ease of navigation (or lack thereof). Luckily, Burak's Blog is very easy to navigate, and this is partially by accident. Let me explain: Burak's current blog template is meant to give a minimalistic, simple look. Due to the template he has chosen, it makes it very easy to see all the posts right next to each other, go back home, see older posts, and look at the sidebar. His template is one with a "read more" button next to every post, which, in my opinion, is a MUST-DO for every single blogger if they seriously want to give their viewers the freedom of choice when it comes to what content to read. He doesn't have labels next to each post, but in my mind, that is optional for blogging, and I don't view that as a definite con.

While it is great being able to scroll up and down his blog, jumping from post to post with ease, what isn't so great? Accidentally clicking on an ad in the process. You knew this would be a thing in my review, so please don't take it personally. This is a review, so I am forced to be honest: The ads are a major problem when it comes to navigation. They get in the way of the post feed list, when you use a touch-screen device you can accidentally click on them while scrolling (they are too close to the sidebar), and make the page load a lot slower. I mean, this isn't necessarily a problem with your blog; It's just a problem of ads in general. My suggestions? Either A.) remove the ads entirely (which I have accepted at this point isn't a realistic option for you), or B.) just position them in a different place, so that they don't get in the way of scrolling. I give the ease of navigation a 93/100.


Visual Appeal
Score: 90%

You know the famous saying: Don't judge a book by its cover. While this is very accurate when it comes to literature, it, unfortunately, doesn't hold up when it comes to websites. You see, the way a site looks greatly affects how readers will think of not only your content but of you, the creator of the site. Burak's Blog is simply okay when it comes to visuals. It isn't downright sloppy or ugly (unlike many other rookie blogs I have seen across the web), but at the moment, it is quite bland. Don't get me wrong: A minimalistic look is great to have, and sometimes makes you look more professional. But the thing is, this blog is nowhere near "professional", and that isn't a bad thing. "Professional" sometimes means "boring", and that is not at all what Burak's Blog is about. Based off of his writing, you can tell that he has an energetic, fun, and vibrant personality. So does my blog. While it can be good to just have black and white colors with Times New Roman Font, that mostly only applies to businesses. For personal blogs, it is best for the blog's appearance to be a reflection of what it means to be you. Burak's Blog, at the moment, is in need of a major visual upgrade to reflect his personality. Some more vibrant colors, interesting fonts, and use of pictures can make this category better than the "default" look that it currently suffers from. You don't have to change the black background though; the mixture of a black background and a create a very sleek and cool look, and you can clearly tell that he has a "space" theme in mind. However, it could still use a bit of improvement, especially when it comes to fonts and just overall decoration.  For now, I rate it 90/100.

Dedication
Score: 98% 

A blog is only as good as the owner of it. If the person behind the blog isn't dedicated to what they do, then you can't expect many high-quality results overall.  This includes how frequently they post, how much effort they put into their posts and blog, and how well they communicate with their fans. Burak is very dedicated to what he does on his blog. He tries to post as much as possible, and make relevant posts. He puts effort into creating all the images and even does it with a drawing tablet. He went out of his way to spend countless hours learning programming, and coding and developing his own separate website called Burak's Blog More. If that doesn't show dedication, then I don't know what does! However, he does have a habit of deleting old posts randomly, so that is something to be aware of. I doubt he'll start doing this again, since the first time was only for Adsense (further proof that Adsense can be like a disease for blogs), and one of the main reasons that I personally haven't deleted all my old content was because I wanted this blog to partially function as a "museum" of sorts to look back to once I grow older for memories-sake. When my old blog on Squidoo got deleted automatically (a long story), I went out of my way to recover the content and copy and paste it onto my new Blogger blog. Burak, my tip to you, and this applies to all Bloggers: Deleting old content because it is "cringy" or "bad" is a very common mistake that will eventually, over time, plague your entire blog. Just look at history: It even happened to Xiang himself, and now both of his blogs are gone. I know that this doesn't apply to Burak's blog, but it is a very crucial piece of advice I'd like to share with him, and it is to preserve old content as much as you can. HIs dedication has no problems whatsoever, so good job. This category gets rated a 98/100.

My Verdict
Average Score Overall: 94.8% 

In conclusion, Burak's blog is a well-written, constantly updated blog full of a wide variety of good topics. His post style is very short and to the point and is easy to digest for the reader. He puts a lot of effort into the creation of new content and the maintenance of his website, proving his strong dedication. While the color scheme and visual choices are slightly boring and don't stand out much, his organization is very neat and easy to navigate. His choices are usually for the better, with major upgrades, good topics, and decent tactics, but some questionable ones still remain: Deleting old content and including ads despite being such a newcomer. The few flaws aside, I strongly recommend anyone who has read my blog to go check his blog out. His is really comparable to mine, so if you like mine, chances are you'd like Burak's Blog too. You're just one adblocker away from a perfect experience. The average score I would rate it would be a 94.8%.

Here is the link to his blog: http://biloglu.blogspot.com/

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I hope you enjoyed this post! If you liked this review that I made today, be sure to view again on mondays to see more of them. I also happen to post almost single day during the summer months (every day except for weekends), so be sure to click the subscribe button at the top of my blog so you can receive email notifications whenever I make a new post. Tomorrow is wednesday, meaning that it is story day on my blog. Feel free to leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments below, but remember to stay positive as I need to approve comments before they become public. If you like my blog, be sure to tell your friends about it so I can gain a greater audience. My current goal is to reach 150K views by the end of the summer, and I am currently at 121K views. Stay tuned, and I hope you enjoy the vast amount of blogging content that is soon to come! :)

Here is a link to my previous post, a story about me running for school president: http://www.arcabaran.com/2018/07/making-my-school-dank-again-story-happy.html

If you liked this post, be sure to browse the labels at the top of the post's sidebar to find other similar posts on this blog. Here is another blog you may like.

Onur’s Blog- First Step, Next Step, This Step: My little brother got inspired by me to start his own blog too! He writes mostly about Nintendo and posts just as often as he gets to take turns using my computer. Here it is: https://onur3.blogspot.com/

My YouTube Channel: I also happen to have a brand new YouTube channel, and will post videos there from time to time. It is called ArcaVids, and you can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeLK4m7tp3K1q2eMxkbQ91g

My Google+ Profile: This is the place to go to see links to new posts, exclusive behind-the-scenes information on my blog, and sometimes there will be polls to decide which blog posts you want to see next. I also post plenty of spicy memes, if that's what you're into. You can tag me via +ArcaBaran Here it is: https://plus.google.com/+ArcaBaran

See you tomorrow, for my next summer blog post! To see my updated schedule, click here: http://www.arcabaran.com/p/summer-2018-blog-schedule.html