Finances & Money

Share the Love Review #4 – Money, Matter & More Musings

This past week, I had to ask myself “What did you get yourself into?” with offering Share the Love reviews to other writers. I’ve received quite a few link requests, and decided to only add a few of them for now. I didn’t know my reviews were so popular!

In true form of a “Review”, I’m going to actually review the site with both positives and negatives from now on. The last 3 reviews were a bit too positive, which is against my nature 🙂

Today, I added Money, Matter & More Musings to my sidebar. Can I use the acronym of MMMM?

About the Author and Site
The author of Money, Matter & More Musings, aka The Tao of Making Money, goes by the name GolbGuru. Golb is just Blog spelled backwards. According to the author:

I am 20-something graduate student experimenting with blogging and personal finance.

Golbguru started the site back in December 2005, but didn’t pick the topic of Personal Finance and Money until September 2006. Good thing, because the site has rapidly gained readership since then!

Interesting Information
Golbguru sent me an email this past week to request a review and a link to his site . Anyway, Golbguru’s email signature has a nifty scrolling article list for
MMMM and a link to subscribe to the site’s RSS feed. Now that’s taking promotion to the next level!

The Good
My first impression when browsing to MMMM is that it has a dizzying array of information. The posts are long, but well-divided and informational, such as a post about Credit Scores and Interesting Facts about Social Security Numbers.

There’s also slightly off-topic posts such as Nutritional Information on a Killer Burger. However, as you may have read in my post about What Is Personal Finance, I can still consider health topics related someone’s finances.

Overall, I like the clean style and use of minimal colors. Having too many colors, and even shades of colors, is confusing and makes my peanut-sized brain hurt. I also like showing Related Articles, which I’ve been meaning to add to Clever Dude, but wanted to wait until I got even more posts published.

Potential Areas of Improvement
I learned from my first job that we don’t say “Pros and Cons” or “Positives and Negatives”. It hurts people’s feelings when they hear “Negatives”, and I don’t want to make my fellow writers cry…to much.

1. I’d like to see a bolder shade for the links. It not only highlights the link, but also adds some more visual breaks in the article. However, I’m only speaking from personal preference here.

2. Also, the huge amount of content in each article is both good for the reader, but makes for a huge page. I’d drop from 8 to about 4 or 5 posts per page, given the article lengths.

3. Lastly, drop the Meta sidebar item, and perhaps add an Archives page rather than have it as a sidebar item. Link to that page on the header. Anything that you can easily make into a page reduces sidebar clutter. And you may know how I HATE CLUTTER!

Keep the requests coming in. If I don’t choose you for a review and sidebar link, I’ll hopefully tell you why. However, it may take me a few days to gain the tact needed to say why. Don’t let that discourage you though! It takes me over an hour to write one of these reviews since I go back through your archives and your About information to get a good idea of who you are, what you write about, how you write, and so forth. I’m a quick writer, but a slow reader.

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