I’ve been having fun and ripping blogs some “new-ones” for the most part of my review series, for free. Before, I didn’t want to do sponsored reviews because it didn’t feel right. However, why shouldn’t I review relevant sites that I’m going to review anyway and get paid for it? Recently, a friend and fellow WordPress designer, Adii, ordered a sponsored review and I decided to accept it so here goes the review for this blog.
If you haven’t noticed, Adii (in motion) also does banner advertising on WPDesigner. He must really love my blog. But, that’s not going to stop me from ripping him a new one. 🙂
First of all, who is Adii?
Adii is a freelance WordPress designer from Cape Town, South Africa. You can browse his portfolio here. For the most part, his style is bold and colorful. Whoever said web design is subjective surely haven’t said it to Adii. However, that doesn’t seem to be raising eyebrows at all as his clients are keeping him busy. He must be doing something right, price, service, and support-wise.
Design-wise
Adii.co.za sports a clean, grid-based, three column blog design. But Adii, you know I despise wide columns with a small font size, in which you could fit eighteen words in one line. Here’s your weekend to-do list to improve your blog’s design:
- Cut the average number of words per line down to fourteen or twelve.
- Don’t justify the main content text because that makes it hard for readers to keep track of which line they’re reading.
- Change the “Want to hire me?” text color to light blue.
- Play with the search form at the upper right-hand corner because it’s not easy to spot that it’s a search form right now.
Content-wise
To date, the most successful series on his blog has been the Mini Interview series. Can you guess whom he first interviewed? It was yours truly, the potato behind WPDesigner.com. I’m guessing I had something to do with motivating him to continue his interview series after sending him some traffic love for the interview effort.
Besides the fact that the mini-interviews are helping Adii’s blog grow traffic-wise, it sure doesn’t suck to be able to get in touch with admirable designers and developers like Veerle Pieters, Jonathan Snook, Roger Johannson, and many more.
Not to mention, Adii worked up the courage and patience (that I dumbfounded-ly didn’t have) to ask for interviews from guys like Seth Godin and Matt Mullenweg.
Below are some of my favorite interviews.
- Listen up if you want to freelance too…
- Wanna roll around in this Sandbox?
- Nate Whitehill on online business and blogging
With the mini-interviews aside, Adii also writes about marketing, WordPress, and web design, but surprisingly he requested for this review to focus on the mini-interviews, which I have no idea why because I think his other series and articles are far better than the mini-interviews simply because his interview questions suck. :-p Especially for WordPress related interviews, there aren’t much room for unique answers and the readers are left wanting more details. Details that Adii’s questions often failed to cover.
Personally, I think WordPress is his strongest topic and he should focus on that to further establish himself as one of the leaders in WordPress design and development. For example, it would be nice to see Adii continue his recent flood of commentary on what Brian and I are working on, regarding premium themes.
