Eleven Signs that your blog sucks

you suckStumblers, readers, friends, and surfers,  I beg your indulgence just this once.  Permit me to take a break  from providing you the high quality dorkage that you’ve come to take for granted and let off a major bitchy rant.   If I don’t do this I’m going to blow a gasket!  What’s causing  my consternation?  Rampant mediocrity!  Basically I am fed up with sucky blogs.  Why do we put up with sucky blogs?  In theory free market Darwinism would cause them to wither away, so I can only venture a guess that there is still a need for education on just what constitutes a sucky blog.   Perhaps you aren’t so confident a blog connoisseur.  If not, please allow an experienced dork to educate you.

How do you know if your blog sucks?  Some clues….

  • Uninvited Music: You play your choice of music when the page loads without asking my permission. How do you know I’m not playing some other music or that my family isn’t fast asleep? Your music might be great but that’s not the point. When you inflict it on me without asking permission you have just demonstrated that you are a rude person and I will close your blog immediately and ban it.
  • Bloatware: Your bloatware blog loads so….slow…. Forget it, I’m history. I don’t wait for blogs unless I already know they’re worth the wait. Put it on a diet for heaven’s sake!
  • Trailer Trash: See Bloatware.  These usually go together, but if you can manage to get a  page with every widget you ever found to load fast enough,  it looks like the the aftermath of a party weekend at a trailer park.  Would I look for an unopened beer among such a mess?  Am I going to look for your “good stuff” among all that brightly colored flashing mess?
  • Nothing there: Your blog is content free. All you do is embed other people’s Youtube videos and/or randomly link to,  paraphrase, or (worse) plagiarize blog articles. Digg and StumbleUpon are for flagging stuff you like. Blogs are supposed to be original.
  • Hurdles: I have to dismiss a popup or some kind of whiz bang flash thingie before I can look at your blog. Or there’s those nasty little peel away thingies in the corner. Why are you creating barriers for me? I don’t feel welcome at all. Bye!
  • Language: Your blog is not in any language I can read, and I do read several.  If I can’t read yours I’m gone.  Of course if you can find people who can, feel free to ignore me.
  • Poor writing: OK, your blog seems to be in a language I know, but it looks like it was written from a cell phone by a fourth grader on crack. Learn proper grammar and spelling. and please restrict the 1337speak and the lolcatese to your text messages.
  • No Focus: Your blog lacks focus. If I go to a blog called Growing Kumquats in Denmark I do NOT want to read about how your dog threw up last night. That’s not to say you can’t throw in a personal observation here and there, but please put the purely personal stuff in a personal blog.
  • Hard sell: You are all about selling before you give me a reason for buying. I read blogs for information. I generally know what I want and where to buy it, but sometimes I look for opinions on books, programs, hardware or software. Occasionally I will buy something because some blogger whom I respect recommended it.  I don’t respect anybody who just tells me to buy stuff.   If you just put up a bunch of affiliate links and gush about how everything is so great, I’ll say “Pass.”
  • Pay to post: This is related to Hard Sell, above.  You were paid for the blog post. Your opinion CANNOT be unbiased if you’re being paid to post it. Those advertisers may let a negative post slip through once in a while to foster the appearance of unbiased reviewing, but do you think they’ll continue to offer you gigs if you don’t gush praise at least most of the time?   Very different from choosing freely what to post about and linking to where to buy it. In the second scenario the blogger only gets something after they have given the reader a compelling reason to buy, and the difference in the quality of the information is night and day.
  • Huge Header: Your blog has this huge header that takes up my whole screen. Don’t make me scroll!

These opinions are mine and mine alone. There may be people somewhere who like being surprised by Kazhakstan traditional polka music at two in the morning or who find themselves tingling with delicious anticipation while the little loading animation goes round and round. To each his own.
As Featured On Ezine Articles

21 comments to Eleven Signs that your blog sucks

  • WOW – What a great post.
    I couldn’t agree more on every single point. My pet hate is overloaded blogs. They take forever and a day to load, and by the time they’re loaded – they’re full of… well for want of a better word – crap.

    Great post dorkage – I have bookmarked you

    PS I would love some of your harsh loving on my blog – any tips would be most welcome.

    Cheers bud

    Solreka
    Brighter Energy Solutions
    http://www.solreka.com/blog

    PPS Commentluv all the way – awesome plugin

    SolRekas last blog post..Introductory offer – Solar table fan and Solar windmill

  • admin

    Hey Rob,

    thanks for dropping by. Hopefully when I make my next post I’ll be in a GOOD mood!!

  • lol
    You remind me off me. I laugh ranting about life.

    It’s good to moan 😉

    PS Thanks again for the review of my blog in BC. I would like to talk with you more regarding solar recipes from your blog food.dorkage.net. Maybe when I have my solar cooker up and running you would like to share some recipes, ideas for expanding each others blogs.

    Take care for now, and I look forward to your next ‘happy’ blog post 🙂

    Regards
    Solreka
    Brighter Energy Solutions
    http://www.solreka.com/blog

    SolRekas last blog post..Introductory offer – Solar table fan and Solar windmill

  • admin

    Recipes would be good. I use Key Ingredient for recipes, that way the recipe can “live” there and anyone can embed it in their blogs with all cross linking goodness etc. but without duplicate content. I hope that people who embed my recipes attribute with a link back! I think the best recipes are the ones with photos.

    How can I get one of these solar cookers? The cooking would be good in Oregon during July and August and September, traditionally our dry sunny season. Other times, you can’t count on it not to rain here, much like I remember from living in Ireland.

  • You’re on my priority list of first customers Colleen

    I will let you know when solar oven is ready, that goes for solar recipes and suchlike

    Keep in touch

    Regards

    SolReka

    SolRekas last blog post..Introductory offer – Solar table fan and Solar windmill

  • Love the post. It’s true for blogs as much as websites. I am very surprised of the number of stupid blogs. However, there is a LOT of good blogs out there also. (o_-)

  • Indeed there are a number of good blogs. I blogroll them if they fit my niche. I wouldn’t be blogging if *all* blogs sucked. Hmmmm…. that gives me an idea: A quality blog badge. You have to pass some objective tests and probably human screening to get one. And of course it would have to be a dynamically served badge, not just a graphic people post. Hmmmmmmm…… that’s a nice little geeky project isn’t it!!

  • Definitely agree with all eleven points. I wrote an article similar to this a while back… it really bugs me when people write about their dog or cat while the blog is suppose to be about a completely different subject. However, there are a few sites that it works well on… it all depends on your audience and how popular your site is.

    Gary R. Hesss last blog post..WP Plugin: Ribbons for Change

  • That’s a great article. I agree on the music. I will get annoyed with Blogs with too colorful. And even too many GIF images like flowers or banner. I hate them.

  • Hi! you just visited my site and I hope my blog is not one of those blog that you hate because of that bloody list 🙂

    manilenyas last blog post..Breaking the vow to celibacy

  • A very nice article you have written. I appreciate the helpful tips and will tell my friends!

  • […] that aren’t quite as slick as for wordpress. Today Akismet flagged 54 spam — all on the Eleven Signs post. (BTW Eleven Signs is my LEAST original post. All the ideas in it had been blogged elsewhere; […]

  • I agree with most of the points on this list, especially the bloatware and uninvited music. Thanks for writing it! 🙂

  • Your post makes one think! Great article. Thanks for allowing me to comment!

  • invited music is a funny one. i have a good laugh when i visit a site that uses MIDI music (also know as muzak). it’s so 1992.

  • Indeed there are a number of good blogs. I blogroll them if they fit my niche. I wouldn’t be blogging if *all* blogs sucked. Hmmmm…. that gives me an idea: A quality blog badge. You have to pass some objective tests and probably human screening to get one. And of course it would have to be a dynamically served badge, not just a graphic people post. Hmmmmmmm…… that’s a nice little geeky project isn’t it!!

  • admin

    I’ve thought about doing that, but it would involve someone vetting huge numbers of crappy blogs. Not me. Well who then? And it could never be objective. One person’s splog is another person’s treasure trove.

  • There are blog owners that doesn’t put much effort on what they write. The key is to know that you have an audience. That way they can focus on what they want to convey and gain huge followers and bam … hard sell 🙂

  • About to start my first blog soon, I will have to reference this list and make sure I don’t do any of these things.

A sample text widget

Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.

Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan. Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem, suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.