This is a review of Pro Blog Design, a blog that shows you how to “Tweak your blog, making it more profitable, usable and attractive.”

Michael, the author of Pro Blog Design, clearly knows a lot more than I do about designing a blog.  This isn’t really something to be proud of, I don’t know anything about designing a blog, but at least it’s true.  Michael’s site really does look clean, interesting, unobtrusive, and invites a reader to have a closer look.

The first thing that I noticed about the blog was the picture of the first post.  It does an excellent job of creating interest in what the article is about.  (In this case full posts vs. short posts with a ‘continue reading’ type link at the bottom).  It was a neat picture of a spiral arrangement of stained glass windows that I hadn’t seen before.

Now, since this is a personal finance and family site, I was very curious as to what kind of money-related or possibly even family-related material his blog may have that all the awesome Financing Your Family readers could use, abuse, or just keep as a handy reference.  In his article Advertising vs. Readership Michael states that he has ”no interest in money at the minute.”  It creates an interesting difference between my site and his, because one of my personal goals with Financing Your Family is to one day be able to just blog on here for a living.  Essentially financing my family.

I haven’t seen a comments section arranged quite like Michael does his either.  It almost looks like a continuation of the post, which allows the reader to continue reading and not ignore the comments.  I think this is a wonderful way to use this aspect of a blog, and I am going to look further into setting something like that up on this site.  Like I said before though, I don’t have as much talent even as Michael seems to have in his little finger when it comes to blog design, maybe after doing this review he’ll come give me some design lessons or something.

Navigating Pro Blog design couldn’t be easier.  I know Wordpress (the software used to write blogs) makes this very easy, but by having a limited number of categories on the main page, Michael gives the blog a cleaner look, and avoids some issues that my blog has with over-categorization.

If there is one big issue that I see with the blog it is the blog’s apparent age.  It looks like a very new blog, with only a handful of articles.  I know this makes it harder to gather RSS subscribers, and it also means that profitability is a far off distant dream for the blog.  Michael has the knowledge to create a masterpiece, a blog that would even rival Darren Rowse’s blog on making money blogging, but as far as I can see there has been little time commitment to it yet, and a continued commitment will ultimately make the blog great.  Because one of this site’s goals is to help new personal finance sites gather readership, I’ve put some links on my blogroll that were deleted for inactivity, being active will provide all that Michael needs to succeed in the blogging world.