BlogReview: eMonetized.com

eMonetized.com is the blog of the owner of the 30,000+ member webmaster forum, Webmaster-Talk.com, Tim Schroeder. In general, eMonetized.com is a blog about making money online. Heard of Problogger, JohnChow and lots of others? Well, eMonetized is in the same niche.

What makes eMonetized interesting for me as a blogger who blogs about blogdesign and wordpressblogs is the fact that eMonetized.com just got a extreme makeover from Unique Blog Designs, which is the company I do some freelance work for. And wouldn’t you know it? It was I who designed eMonetized.com.

And, I think the result is really good. Very modern these days, with a HUGE header with lots of information, and of course - those 125×125 banner ads near the top in the right sidebar. This design and layout is very “in” nowadays. You have already seen it on several big blogs, and you’ll certainly see this kind of layout in lots more blogs in the near future.

THE DESIGN:
The design I made for eMonetized.com is very image-dependent, with lots of gradients. This makes it somewhat less lightweight then many other blogs. But, the site doesn’t take much time to load anyway. Those images aren’t that big in size.

Even tough it was I who designed eMonetized.com, Nate Whitehill of Unique Blog Designs have done much of the after-work on the site. I mean things like installing plug-ins, tweaking images, adding icons here and there and what not. Those small things which make a design feel “complete”. I guess there are a few things still remaining - as always is on designs. Designs are never finished. There is always something you could add or remove to make it better.

The layout of eMonetized.com is pretty classic, with a dominant header, a right sidebar with menu elements and with a somewhat huge footer. Its nothing special about this, but this is not a blog selling designs. It would be really stupid to do something too creative for a blog like this. The design should be practical, and this one is.

I’m really satisfied with the result, and is of course sending lots of kudos to Nate Whitehill for making it even better.

CODE:
The general code, I’m thinking of the code of the template and the css, is correct. I would know. I wrote it. But, eMonetized.com have lots of plug-ins, forms, and social gizmos making it impossible to get a validated code in the end.

This is not a problem for most users, and doesn’t really matter. Its really a choice you make; having lots of functions and funny gizmos and not a code that validates, or something standard boring with a code that validates. eMonetized.com chose the first option.

Marketing/Success/Potensial:
Website Score Tool provides these numbers for the site:

The numbers are not as great as I expected, but considering that eMonetized.com haven’t been around forever, its a relatively new site, the numbers aren’t half bad. The pagerank of zero may be wrong, but I tried checking it on several services, and all of them got the same result, pagerank zero.

I expect these numbers to be improved greatly over the next half year.

SUMMARY:
Its funny to see the design come alive after working on it for some time. Its even funnier that a commentator on the site said that this design is better the the design of JohnChow! Funny for me as the designer that people love the work done.

Hopefully the client feel that the design was worth the money he paid for it.

PS! If you like to get your blog a extreme makeover just like emonetized has, run over to Unique blog designs and order your extreme makeover today. We are really good.

Anyway, visit emonetized and see the new design at:
http://www.emonetized.com/