The Trader’s Narrative

Word Count: 652

March 22nd, 2007 | Alan | Website Review

This is the first of my website reviews for this blog. If you’d like to learn about this program, please check out http://chamber.quadium32.com/4/website-reviews/ and if you are interested in having your site reviewed for basically free, contact me.

Background Info:

The Trader’s Narrative is a Market/Trading website. It includes a blog, an article section, a T-Shirt store, as well as a way to contact the owner of the site. The 404 page says that we need to remind him to implement a search bar, so I’ll go ahead and get the reminding over with. The site has been around since at least April of ‘06, that is the oldest post on the blog that I could find, at least. Well, without further ado, I will begin reviewing the site.

Visual Design

The visual design is nice and simple, I like that. The ads are placed in an area where they don’t detract your attention from the main content of the site. The links on the top do blend in a little bit with the background, but not enough to cause a huge hindrance. It isn’t the most intricate design, but the grays with the pastel banner work nicely to make the look very smooth and calm. Nothing too fancy, but good. I give it a 6/10. (Pretty Good)

Content

This site is not short of content at all. The clever T-Shirt caught my eye. The product fits in with the theme of the site very well. The articles section I am presuming is new, as I only saw about three links on that page. The articles are in blog format, which isn’t a bad thing in itself. They are referred to as longer and evergreen, which does make sense of why they would be placed on their own page, so that they would get more exposure. There seems to be at least one new article posted per day on average recently, which is a nice rate. Not too much to push the new articles down quickly, but not few enough to leave readers wondering if the blog is still running. The content offered on this site is very applicable to real world usage, and although its audience is mainly going to be people in the trading market, the information offered seems very valuable. I give the content a 7/10. (Very Good)

Other Basics

This section is worth a total of 10 points, so as much as the other three sections. But, it is judged based on 5 different areas: Site Functionality (does it run well?), Advertising Value (is this a good site to advertise on?), Sense of Community (does it seem like the people here are able to get to know each other?), and Ease of Navigation (is it easy to get around the site?). Each of those receives 2 points towards the total of 10.

Site Functionality: 2/2 The site loads fast, and I encountered no glitches while browsing the site.

Advertising Value: 1/2 The site has lots of great content and a pretty decent PR of 4, but still has an alexa rank above one million, which can deter some advertisers.

Sense of Community: 1/2 There obviously is an element of community in the blog, and the sidebar includes a list of recent comments. But, besides through blog comments, there doesnt seem to be much of a way to communicate.

Ease of Navigation: 2/2 The site is very easy to get around. There isn’t really a way to get lost in the site, as the links are in easy to see places.

Overall Score

6.3/10 (Pretty Good)

To any of you reading this, please do not think that a 6/10 rank is a low score. The way that I review websites makes it hard to score anything above an 8. Anything above a 5 on here is something to be proud of. I recommend that you check out the Trader’s Narrative, there is a lot to learn about economics.

Scores Archive:

http://www.tradersnarrative.com/ - 6.3/10