For my second peer review, I’m looking at Dominic’s blog on Web3, finance, & tech! His blog URL is http://dominicdavis.ca. Right off the bat, I can really see that Dominic is very passionate and knowledgeable about tech, finance, and crypto! I love that he’s focusing on writing about topics he’s excited about, and you can really tell in his posts that it’s something he loves and wants to continue to pursue in the future. With Dominic’s “self-presentation” (Hollenbaugh, 2020, p.81), he does a really good job at tying his own personality and passion to providing facts and value about finance and tech. I’m personally not as familiar with these topics, but I like how he has categorized his posts about NFT’s and tech under “Research” and then his PUB 101 content under “Posiel”. I think his categorization and organization of posts make his blog accessible and easy to navigate!
Although I do think that Dominic’s background image is a great photo and matches the blogs theme and topic pretty well, I would recommend making the background image a header image and making the background a plain solid colour to allow for better readability. I think it would be really beneficial to have more white space, as well as determining primary, secondary, and accent colours for the blog. There are some parts where it’s really hard to read the text, which I think is due to the font being too light of a colour and the background being too harsh, so in that case I would recommend going with a lighter background and a darker font! Nowadays “there’s a higher demand for better-designed interfaces” (Gertz, 2015), and therefore I think that especially with content on finance and tech, which aren’t very visual subjects to begin with, it would be really beneficial for the blog to have a cleaner and modern design. Using images, graphs, and videos to emphasize the content would be such a great improvement I think! Overall in terms of design, I like the colours, fonts, and visuals used, but I think they need to all work together a bit better to make it more readable and easy on the eyes.
Another recommendation or suggestion I have for Dominic’s blog, is to have his home page separate from his “About me” section. I noticed he has a blurb introducing himself and his interests on his home page, but instead I think it would be great in its own “About me” category. Additionally, I think he could remove where it says “blog” on his home page, and instead focus on making the home page more visual, as content is so much more focused on visuals now than text (Kissane, 2013). Another suggestion I have for his home page, is to provide some interesting insights or statements about each of his categories and making them clickable to his categories page. This way, his audience or anyone landing on his blog would be able to tell distinctively what his blog is about, in a more visual and clear way, and be able to navigate to posts related to each category really easily as well.
Overall, I really enjoyed getting to review Dominic’s blog, and I think it’s coming along really well and he’s making good progress 🙂 And of course, there’s still room for improvement and development from here!
References
Gertz, Travis. 2015. “Design Machines. How to survive in the digital Apocalypse.”
Hollenbaugh, Erin E. December 24, 2020. “Self-Presentation in Social Media: Review and Research Opportunities“
Kissane, Erin. 2013. “Contents May Have Shifted” in Contents Magazine 4. Available from: http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/contents-may-have-shifted/
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