Website Review: Infect the System

Infect the System is a blog attached to a web hosting company.  The blogger attempts to help beginning web designers, hosters and other web masters get going.

OMG TLI!:  Its odd, when I visit a website that wants to blog about CSS, hosting your own web server and being a web designer I expect to be flooded with information.  Most people who blog about this kind of stuff have a billion things to share and they tend to try to pour it all into every single post.  This website is the completely opposite.  Maybe I should applaud the writer for showing some restraint but instead I’m going to mock him for treating his probably very tech savvy crowd like morons.

Easy example, his current series on Starting a Web Hosting Company starts out with a post dedicated to choosing a domain name.  The post is maybe 200 words long and gives no information that would be new to someone who’s chosen a domain name before.  This is all about targeting your audience.  It’s very important to know who you’re catering to.  Anyone thinking of opening their own web hosting company is going to know about domain names.  It’d be like having a blog on advanced sugar work (ex made me watch Food Network) and having a post on the difference between a frying pan and a sauce pot.  Good information, wrong audience.  Treat your audience like they’re smart and you’ll be surprised how much more they’re into your information.  Also it greatly raises the chances your post will get picked up by Slashdot or Digg.

Honesty is our Number 1 Policy: There are many websites out there in which the designer feels the need to trick the visitor into clicking on ads.  It’s like they know the visitor has no interest in clicking on ads but they want to make money, customer retention be damned.  This guy has the complete opposite strategy.   His ads are labeled “Google Adsense.”  Kudos for honestly.  I’m all about the honestly (yes your butt looks fat in those jeans).  But there’s got to be a happy medium where the ads don’t stand out like a sore thumb and aren’t hidden and sneaky.  Obviously it’s not this guy’s intention to make a living off his ads.  I’d get rid of them entirely for reasons I’ve mentioned a million times before.  The blog has to do a better job of drawing people to the hosting company.  Make the link (both literal and textual) between the two a little more obvious.  It’ll lend the blog credibility and get the hosting company more business.

Their is alot rong with this blog: Alot is not a word.  A and lot are two separate words often paired together.  I’d like to make this abundantly clear to everyone reading.  There isn’t a spell check on this planet that will allow “alot” to go through without a bleep.  Yet somehow this happened on Infect the System.  Maybe his system is infected, ha!  Also a lot of the grammar is stilted and clunky.  There’s an article called How to Prepare for a Web Design.  I get it, it’s like “How to prepare for a fire drill.”  But it just reads wrong.  “How to Prepare for a Web Design Contract” or “How to Prepare to Be a Web Designer” would both work better.  Look, I’m no professional writer.  I’m an engineer.  I remember getting Ds on several writing papers over my life.  But I typically know when something just sounds wrong.  The writer needs a little help with his English, that’s all I’m saying.

Smart Man, Dumb Blog: I hate this website because it’s teetering on being a really good useful website.  The guy running it knows a shitload about what he does.  Unfortunately he’s not good at sharing it.   Also he appears to take long periods of time off as there hasn’t been anything new posted in almost three weeks and posts before that were quite sporadic.  I skip a day here and there but never three weeks.  That’s like years in the real world.