I’m going to be doing a banner exchange with Cell Phone Know How, so I might as well give them a review as well.  Don’t worry, it won’t be pretty.

Cell Phone Know How is a site that proposes to tell you everything you need to know about cell phones.  They focus almost exclusively on T-Mobile phones and services.

Something Wicked This Way Comes: It’s too easy to spend an hour of my life bashing this site for being ugly.  It’s pretty damn ugly.  Let’s leave it there.  The colors suck, the layout is cluttered and way too full of ads.  It’s lazy to the extreme.  Why am I exchanging banners with this tool?  Probably because they’re the first people to ask and their page is ranked better than mine on Google.  Can’t say no to that.  I’ll give them credit for one thing, their ads are colored like T-Mobile ads.  That makes them look almost official and very eye catching.  Good idea there.  The rest is so lazy my tuba residing cat could have come up with something better.   I accept some people might like light text with a dark background.  I think they’re insane, but it’s their right.  At least come up with a custom header.  This default wordpress crap is lazy.

Let’s Talk About Ads Baby: How many ads does one site need?  Let’s count them, shal we?  There’s the Adsense, the Amazon affiliates, the Content Link (fucking hate those things!) and those fake Google links on the sidebar.  Technically those are Adsense as well, but I’m counting them seperately because they look so different.  Everyone has to make a living but there is too much ad dilution here.  Focus a little better.  If I had to chose something to go it’d be the Amazon stuff.  I’ve tried it before and it’s really hard to get people to click through to Amazon and buy immediately unless you’re some major site where people trust you.  And Cell Phone Know How isn’t trustworthy at all.  I’d prefer to ditch the in text ads, but somehow I think that’s this guy’s best bet.

Why Is This Site So Crappy?  It’s written for search engine traffic, fugly and generally useless.  But, if you take the time to read a few posts, the guy writing them actually knows what he’s talking about.  It’s bizarre.  It’s like a race car driver rolling around town in a 1985 Dodge Pinto.  First apperances (and second) suggest the guy is lame, but if you bother to look a little deeper, he’s actually quite good.  Recently he talked about cell phone ringtones, possibly the most overdone topic on the net.  Now, I’d say four or so of the things on this list suggest the guy is a borderline retard.  But then he mentions having high pitched noises in your outdoor ringtone because they’re easy to distinguish where it’s noisy.  What the hell?  Why can’t all the articles be that intelligent?  Why can’t that whole list?  Take five minutes and write a decent post why don’t you?

I Ain’t Going Back:  Look, I’m an engineer.  I know enough about cell phones that I don’t need to visit this site which was apparently written for morons.  It’s not for me.  Also it’s lazy, ugly and stupid most of the time.  But if you feel like picking through pages of crap, you might find a good nugget in there.  Also some of the pages are quite old.  The guy seems to have taken a few months off and only started writing again a week ago.  So, some of the stuff might be outdated.

But hey, glad to accept a link and link back to you.  I have no standards myself.