Blog Review: Retireat21

This is was a paid review by Don Gilbert of mastersofseo. If you are interested in a paid review, check out my advertise page for more information. As you can see I cover all the aspects of your site. This is a great chance for you to get constructive criticism about your site.

Today I’m presenting you with retireat21.com which is administered by Michael Dunlop

Blog Template

The blog has a nice color scheme, with the green, grey and white coming together nicely. But the blog looks very cluttered, he has every possible feature I’ve seen on a blog. He’s got ads, blog posts, featured posts, recent posts, recommended sites, favorite sites, forum activity, about page, recent interviews, an ebook, the list goes on and on. The site looks very cluttered and needs a severe spring clean up job. There are several empty white spaces at the bottom of the page for some reason, which make it look like he wasn’t finished. The header and footer, are crammed with pages, and thus looks unprofessional. Very congested site appearance, with gives you a bad first impression.

Final Grade
4/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
Prioritize! Figure out which of your widgets are most important, and get rid of the rest, because right now it looks like you’re trying to cram too much information, into too small a space. This would be my opinion, but ditch the Michael’s favorite sites, or make it smaller and in the footer. Get ride of a lot of the pages. Make the about box on the sidebar, into a page. I don’t know how much money the shop is making, if it’s a lot then maybe it’s worth it. But I would recommend making that into a page at the top, or getting rid of it. A section called Retire@21 products would be a great way to advertise all of the things you’re selling. You could put your e-book and t-shirt links in this. I would recommend putting it where the about page is now, you’d probably sell more, and it would look more organized. Ditch the news post, and stop posting them as the featured posts. I would recommend either doing your featured interviews at the bottom, or just make it your most recent blog posts. I think if you made larger email/RSS buttons, you could improve your subscriber results. Maybe you could remove the search box, and then stretch the buttons to fill that space.

Navigation Through Site

All the pages are clearly in the middle of the header, but there are so many of them it almost makes it difficult. There are several unnecessary pages like news, creating websites, and then directory, hasn’t even been used for anything yet. It just has several test posts. Right now the site has recent posts/interviews options, so you can really take advantage of this. He seems to really be stressing new visitors seeing past posts.

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
I think instead of all the different widgets showing past posts, and nice archives system could do the job. You could set up a nice one on the homepage, and that would accomplish everything you are trying to do. Just make sections like Featured posts, Must Reads…

Final Grade
6/10

Extra Pages

There are Lots of extra pages. In total there are 37 page links, that is the most I’ve ever seen, and probably will ever see. Does that mean it’s bad? Not necessarily because each of them has great, informative content, but I think they could be compiled somewhat.

Final Grade 5/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
Many of these pages are very small, and have a couple posts on them, then seemed to have been forgotten about. Ones like website ideas, and press releases, should be removed. There are many others on there can aren’t necessary, and could be compiled into fewer ones. Again a nice archives system could help eliminate part of this problem.

Content Quality

This is the clear selling point of the blog. It is one of the top blogs on the internet in this respect. It has some incredible interviews of famous internet entrepreneurs like Yaro Starak, Darren Rowse, Aaron Wall, and tons of others. He has lots of great lists, ranking top young moneymakers, and top bloggers. These lists have been really popular. He also runs a full-time blog, and forum, that both have great content on them. This has, and always will be the selling point of this site.

Final Grade
9/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
There isn’t much to comment on as far as content wise. What you do, you do great. However, my only thought would be, is more How to articles. Maybe an article on the affiliate marketing, or site flipping or something. I get all fired up after reading all these success stories, to get out their and start making money, so some tutorials would be a great help to bloggers trying to take it to the next level.

Ads

There are five different sets of ads on his homepage, but you would probably never of known that if I hadn’t told you. It has two affiliate marketing buttons, for Blogging to the Bank. One google adsense ad, and a set of text links and 125×125 ads.

Final Grade
7/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
They really aren’t much of a problem, but I just wonder if they are worth it. It doesn’t seem like the google adsense ad would make enough money to make it worth it, maybe it does but it just seems out of place, especially with it’s irrelevant ads. Google ads don’t seem to do a good job of having relevant links typically, so I would consider switching if not taking it down. There are two affiliate marketing boxes which are the exact same. They are right next to each other, and so it seems rather pointless to have both. I would recommend removing one. The text link and 125×125 ads are fine, they are too big, and I’m sure are good money makers. It’s rare to see all the text links filled up so I guess he’s making good money from them.

Site Stats

This site boasts an impressive 70K Alexa Ranking, with a PR of 3, which is ok for a blog. It only has a Technorati ranking of 118K but these links are purely through direct links. He does almost no commenting, and so unlike most blogs that have manipulated their way to a high ranking to lots of commenting, these are all purely from blogs that liked his content. So in reality it has a much better ranking then you might think.

Final Grade
8/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
Both of these ranking systems are very skewed and don’t reflect the true stats. It is averaging a large amount of visitors, and the Alexa ranking is very impressive. According to siteanalytics it got about 40K hits last month.

Drum-roll Question

Is this site worth visiting right now, Yes or No?

Yes. Despite poor navigation, and a crowded interface, the content is too great to pass up. A poor homepage is not enough to doom a site. These interviews have priceless information, and should be read by all bloggers. Any future entrepreneurs, or people seeking to make money online should definitely stop by. Especially for the new wave of teenage bloggers, and young entrepreneurs, these articles will be really useful to them.

Please consider subscribing to retireat21 by clicking here.

Final Constructive Criticisms

I asked several bloggers, to give me their first impressions of retireat21.com. So these are the opinions of Daniel Scocco and Normal Joe.

Objective Opinions

Daniel Scocco from dailyblogtips.com

“I came across RetireAt21.com a while ago, and the name of the site intrigued me to I decided to check it out. The information I found was interesting, particularly the series of interviews that the author conducted with young entrepreneurs. The design is pretty clean as well.”

Normal Joe from imwithjoe.com

I like the site, I used to visit it frequently when I first started reading various blogs. I haven’t been over there in a while but I think it’s a
great site and instills hope in people by seeing folks that are so young have success just from their creative ideas. I think the theme layout makes it easy to consume the information without forcing you to focus on one particular story. They have features, but other stories strategically placed on the front page so everyone can chose which they want to read. It’s efficient and effective.

This is was a paid review by Don Gilbert of mastersofseo. If you are interested in a paid review, check out my advertise page for more information. As you can see I cover all the aspects of your site. This is a great chance for you to get constructive criticism about your site.

Please comment below, if you have constructive criticisms to add. I’m sure Michael would like to hear your opinion as well.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Case Studies, Site Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.