This is a paid review from www.thoughts.com

Thoughts.com is something different altogether. It is a community of bloggers all with free blogs provided by thoughts.com. All the blogs are visible within the main window, which means easier navigation for the readers.

The blogs are not traditional blogs from a design viewpoint rather posts which other community members can comment on.

The design

The design of the blog is clean, simple, and very appealing to the eye as you can see from the screenshot above.

The navigation of the site is very user friendly and easy to navigate even for the most computer illiterate person. The navigation links are clear and are not too crowded as to confuse the reader; there are less than 30 links on the main page. This might sound a lot but compared with other sites, which can have 70-100 links on the main page it is not a lot.

Sky blue and white are the predominant colours of the site, which again is very appealing.

The Concept

The thoughts behind the site is to involve the community from the word go. There is a user rating system so each user can rate everyone else’s blog posts, photos, videos and podcasts. If a particular blogger has an overall user rating of 4 they will then be rewarded and allowed to post on the community blogs section of the site, which are the most read section on the site.

It is a good thing to be able to post in the community section of the site however, thoughts.com do not stop there. They are planning to reward their top bloggers with an all expenses paid trip every year, this year it is Las Vegas. I don’t know of any other community site that does this. Read more about it here

Signing up

Signing up is a very easy affair and it can be done within a minute or two. There are various features to let other bloggers to get to know you better. The usual photo and bio.

Videos, podcasts and more

The cool thing about the site, and indeed one of its main features, is the easy way you can add a podcast, a video, a photo and indeed a post.

There is no need for HTML knowledge; it’s a case of browsing for the file on your computer and saving it on the site, easy!

Possible downsides

I have spent an hour or two on the site over the last few days and it seems to me that the site is for a specific age group from the 20 – 40’s age group. This is my initial thoughts and I do not know the demographics. However, if this is the case it seems that there are two vital age groups that are not catered for, one being the 15-20 age group and the other being the over 40’s. From a marketing point of view it might be a good idea to have a sister site for these age groups.

Conclusion

My overall impression of the site is a professional, clean, easy to navigate site. It is very much community focused and I can see it growing into a big community of bloggers. The fact that you can very easily add videos, podcasts, photos and posts will ensure that the site will get a lot of exposure over the coming months.

I expect you will be hearing a lot more of thoughts.com

If you would like a review of your site on this blog click here and order a review or click on the ReviewMe below

Label printing for time management

The beauty of doing product reviews is that you get stuff sent to you for free to try. Andrea Hurtado asked me to do a review through ReviewMe.com and advised that she would send out a label printer. I thought I wasn’t going to have enough time to test the product as I was away for a few days, however it arrived today which was great customer service.

I was asked to do a review of label printers for the web site cableorganizer.com. I thought about this and was going to turn it down as it doesn’t really have anything to do with personal development. However I remembered when my computer had crashed and I had to re cable all of my workspace. Cables were getting mixed up and it was hard to find which cable went to which component. So, from a time management point of view I decided to take the review on.

DYMO RhinoPRO 1000

I was swiftly sent a Dymo RhinoPRO1000 and immediately unpacked it and got to work. As you know we are going on holiday for a few days so we have some mobile phone chargers, dvd player chargers, in car chargers, enough cabling to wire New York. I unpacked the printer without reading the instructions, packed in the 6 AAA batteries and set about printing. I printed 6 labels for all the cables we had for going away. I carried on printing and even managed to label the dog.

So for ease of use it was great. I read the instructions to see what else it could do.

One of the other neat features of this was the Hot key feature. Common audio-visual, safety and electrical symbols are available at the press of a button. I didn’t have much use for this feature. However I discovered that I can set my own hot keys which was a great feature.

You can read about the other features here

Best features

The thing I liked most about the Dymo RhinoPRO 1000 was it’s ease of use and the fact that it is handheld and easy to control. The ability to et hot keys was also a great time saving feature.

Now that I have labeled all the cables in the house it will save me a lot of head scratching in the future. I literally have about 20-30 plugs and cables that I have collected over the years and I have no idea what they are for. Now that is no longer a problem as I can label

Anything I didn’t like?

He only thing I didn’t like about this particular model is that it can only be used with batteries, it does not have a power adaptor. This wouldn’t be a major problem for the likes of me as I would only use it every now and again. I was thinking more of the electrical manager down the local power plant. This was the only fault I could find, and believe me I was looking for faults.

The web site

The web site for http://cableorganizer.com/ is easy to navigate and is painless when it comes to ordering. I carried out a mock order to test it.

There is a huge range of all things cables, I didn’t think there would be a huge market for these kinds of products, but how wrong was I.

Overall opinion

From a time management point of view, having a label printer can save a lot of time and hassle, especially if you have lots of computers equipment and other gadgets about the house. It can also be a great time saver for business use also.

I liked the fact that when I agreed to do the review the printer was with me 3 days later, I can’t even get Royal Mail to deliver that quickly. I was impressed with the efficiency and swiftness it took to get the printer.

I will definitely be using the label printer again and recommending it to my friends and family.

You Opinions

If you have any opinions of label printers why not share them with everyone else by leaving a comment.

This post is a paid review as part of the Review-Me

David Birch of Hear-Hear.com has asked
me to write a review of his site.

About the blog

David Birch has created a blog created with software from CityDesk,
correct me if I am wrong there David. It does not have the usual design
aesthetics that a wordpress or typepad template might have, but it gets the
information across.

The blog has an eclectic collection of articles ranging from software hacks
to life hacks. Clicking through the articles and reading a lot of them
there is some great information in them. The articles are short and to
the point and get the message across which is always a good thing.

Design

Colours on the site: red and black certainly do grab the readers attention
and has become, I suspect, part of the brand of hear-hear.com. For me
the colours work and I have used them myself on blog designs. The simplicity
of the design lends itself to these colours.

The design itself is a two column design with a 60/40 design spilt, so the
left column takes up 40% of the fixed width and the right is left for the content. From
a design point of view I would have this as a 75/25 split as the left column
is only housing the basics such as archives, about me, categories, subscribe
me, and Google ads. This would give the reader a better focal point for
the actual content itself.

The headings are very important in a blog and David has opted for, sometimes,
long descriptive titles and has not blended the colours of the headings to
the blog, they are dark grey. I would use a red for the headings and
have the main body black text, like it is. I would also have the headings
in a smaller font and use less but more descriptive words in the heading. This,
I believe, would attract the readers eye more and would be easier on the eye.

Content

As I mentioned before some of the content is good and has some good information.

Some of the posts can be seen here:

O’Reilly
school of technology

Online
file convertors

To
Rent or to Buy Real Estate? This thingie calculates the answer to that question.

Post
length ranges from 38 words to 330 words. The posts seem to all
have a date of 17th November or 16th January, which I don’t quite understand
as when I have clicked through on them the dates change. I would fix
this as it can put readers off. One of the first things I do when checking
out a blog is look at the posting dates so I know if the blog is kept up to
date.

The blog as whole is not focused on any one topic. If you are trying
to attract readers to your blog it might be confusing for them as they don’t
really know what your blog is about. Is it a tech blog, is it a personal
development blog, is it a games blog? It’s hard to discern. Break
up your topics and focus them more and have 6 blogs on the topics you are passionate
about.

Conclusion

I have to be honest with this and say there are a lot of things that could
be changed on the blog to make it more readable and more user friendly. David,
if you are serious about your blog I would look at the following and implement
some changes:

• SEO: to get search engine traffic change your Meta name keywords
• Change your
  titles to red and make them shorter and more descriptive
• Make your blog more
  focused on the topic you are most passionate about
• Change the article length
  to an average of around 250 words
• Again for SEO change your tagline to something
  more descriptive

If you would like to comment on this review please leave
a comment. David
I would welcome your feedback here and thank you for giving me the chance
to review your blog.