How can I evaluate a blog?

This guide assembles a series of posts on blog evaluation published by Peter Casier on blogtips.org in 2010. In his series, Peter describes a heuristic approach to evaluating a blog’s key areas with the purpose of providing clear, actionable recommendations:

1. Ask questions: Get to know the background: Why, How, Who?
2. Check the numbers: Analyze the basic traffic patterns and Analytics numbers
3. First impressions: How does a first time visitor see the blog?
4. The blog’s real estate: Are all the relevant parts visible?
5. Usability: How accessible and “usable” is the blog?
6. Speed: Is the blog optimized for all bandwidths?
7. Search engine optimization (SEO): How does the blog cater for search engines crawlers?
8. Graphical presentation: The different parts that should make a blog “pleasing to the eye”

The series originally targeted anyone asked to evaluate a blog and, therefore, assumed that the evaluator was not the blog master/owner.

We hope the guide here will be a useful tool for blog masters and owners to carry out a self-assessment of their own blog(s) and will provide some insights on things to consider when designing a new blog. There are many aspects of a blog that are not covered in this guide, such as their integration in organizational communication strategies and policies, workflows, etc. However, we do hope it provides some good insights on how to draw up checklists for evaluations.

We at ICT-KM have edited and packaged the series in a guide, offered as a document for offline reading (credit goes to Davide Piga for collecting the posts in one place as a start).

Feel free to share, circulate, download and print the guide. Remember, that this guide is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and that photos should be credited to Peter Casier.

Download the Guide (500Kb)

Feedback is, as usual, more than welcome: leave your comments, suggestions, further insights in the comments box.

Enjoy!