Site Review Blog

Most of us who live in a developed country at some time during our live takes out a loan and goes into debt.  Some people seem to manage it without problems, but the majority have a lot of trouble managing. The Debt Consolidation blog has been going for over a year and has a heap of posts on this subject.  The best place to get financial advice is from an Accountant or Financial planner.  Yes, I have used both of these sort of services! The blog has a lot of general information in it that is reasonably well aligned to the sort of advice you would get from a professional.

Some advice I recently had was to use the equity in my home to borrow enough money to pay off the high-interest credit card debt that I have. The principals are sort of explained in the debt consolidation in a nutshell post.  While it was not exactly what my circumstances are, the overall approach was what my financial advisor reccommended.  So, on the face of it, I found some advice that was closly aligned to what I had been advised.

In this day and age where it seems just so easy to be able to borrow money, getting into debt and getting into trouble financially has never been easier!  Now, we all know the basic way to stay debt-free is to not spend beyond our means, but at times it can get away from you.  Even if you currently don’t have any debt or loans this blog is a reasonable read.  Education is a powerful thing, and knowing about how easy it is to get into debt and spend the rest of your life struggling just might help you make a wise purchasing decision and stay relatively debt-free. 

One of the recent posts about staying out of debt really does highlight the lifestyle choices you have by making smart choices.  By not going into debt that you cannot manage to repay at a young age may mean huge differences for the rest of your life!  If you consider that you don’t need a brand new car while at college and an older one will do - it may not be cool or trendy, but is it worth being cool if you are paying soo much for your car that you have to take out a student loan?  See how easy it is to get into trouble!

Visit  debt-consolidation.strategy-blogs.com

The Sticker Exchange is a small company that is located in California that specialises in Printing Stickers. Stickers are a great way to advertise and promote your business, and getting someone to custom make them is by far the best way to go.  Just think for a minute as to all the different types of stickers that you can.  Well, I can think of a few, such as labels on a bottle, bumper stickers and other novelty items, Labels for envelopes and even those tamper-proof ones that are used when you buy certain items.

The Sticker Exchange can help you design all sorts of stickers for all sorts of applications.  There are a lot more ways to use stickers than I first thought of. 

The website, as you would expect has a fairly large range of examples of their work and provides full contact information including phone numbers and email address.  They even provide a quote form, making it easy for you to provide some information on your requirements.  The website itself is not what I would call modern, but it is functional.  The site was probably created back in 2003 (well, the copyright notice says 2003) and has only had some minor updates and additions since then.  I normally don’t like to make a negative comment about a site, but this one has great content, provides all the info that you want and is just in need of a full overhaul and update.

I only uderstand all too well the expenses often involved in creating, maintaining and updating a website for a small business and the site is probably seen as only 1 of their advertising methods.  I am not judging the company by their website after reading the customer feedback posted on the site.  I am just guessing that they provide a great product at a great price!

Visit www.stickersexchange.com

The one key concept of a market based economy is that everyone is out to make a profit.  If you run a business of any size you would already understand the concepts that you offer either goods or a service for less than it costs you. Now, how you actually go about doing this can be a bit of a mystery if you are just staring out in the world of business or even if you are considering starting a business. Profit501 is a website that gives some relavent and general info to help turn your venture into a profitable one.

Getting your business started and making sure that you are running at a profit is not as easy as it sounds.  The article on setting a reasonable fee really does highlight this very well.  By looking at how someone else has failed, you really stand a better chance of success.  Another article really sums up what a business is all about - and that is exploiting price differences.  This article was the only one on the site that was quite short - I was loking for more from it!

Profit501 is part of the 501 network of sites, some of which we have already reviewed over the last few weeks.  The sites are all fairly closely related, but target a different niche.  This one is aimed at running a business and from the current articles looks quite good.

Visit www.profit501.com

Moving from one country to another is not something that everyone does and those that do can have some great experiences along with the not so great. Mexico501 is a blog about a family that did just that, they decided to move from the US to Mexico and live there for a few years.  Rather than just do it, like most people would, they went ahead and wrote about some of their experiences about living in Mexico in a blog.

Now, this might seem like a pretty radical move, and almost everyone around the world hears about people tring to go North across the border, you don’t often hear about people going in the other direction.  I guess it also take a bit of courage to pick up and move from one country to another and live and after reading a bit on this site I found it pretty fascinating.

The blog looks like it was getting very regular updates for a few months and now - nothing.  I really hope that this is due to the owners taking a vacation!  I can say that I couldn’t find a single post that was not interesting in some way - the cultural differences and how someone is handling it is what is so interersting about it all.  Some of the posts about visiting the hospital are a little on the personal side and for a site that is all about living in another country I think concentrate a bit too much on this - The general information about communicating when the Doctors only speak a little English and the Patient only speaks a few words of Spanish are the interesting parts of these posts.

What is really great about the blog is that there is also a gallery of some photos that add to the overall story.  The pictures show different parts of Living in Mexico.  The pictures by themselves, unfortunately, only tell part of the story.  Only a few of them are captioned and the un-captioned ones would really benefit from a few words.  If all the pictures were captioned then me, the reader would have probably spent a bit more time browsing the gallery and reading about the pictures.

The site, even though it would currently benefit from a few minor updates provides a fascinating glimpse of someone moving from the US to Mexico.

Visit www.mexico501.com

Everyone who has been married certainly knows what a stressful time it can be leading up to the big day and organising everything.  There are literally hundreds of little tasks that need to be taken care of, from the guest list to the flowers and everything else in between.  One of those just happens to be the Wedding Invitations.  You could get a simple card and write out all of them yourself of you could get your cards professionally printed.

Choosing your wedding invitation cards has also never been easier as by shopping online and being able to see your choices. Wedding Invitations 123 makes it easy with their catalogue of over 300 different cards to choose from! Getting your cards printed by a company that specialises in printing cards means that there is one less thing to worry about.  You could contact any printing company, but they would charge a considerable amount to do a small-run print job which is usually the case with invitations.

Right on the front page they let you know that an order can usually be completed within 48 hours!  As they are located in San Diego, you will have your order posted and in your hands pretty quickly.  If you cannot choose between a few, you can additionally request a sample be posted!

The website is set up with a shopping cart that you can easily browse.  Once you have chosen your card then you can easily complete the rest of the details for your order.  If you have ever shopped online before you will have no trobule browsing the catalogue and finding what you are looking for.

Visit www.weddinginvitations123.com

Everyone who runs a website desires to rank high in the Search engine Results.  To get a site ranking high can take a lot of time, effort and knowledge.  There are several people who document their experience and steps taken to acheive these results.  The Ituloy AngSulong Blog falls into this area.

Now If you are like me, you are probably wondering what the term Ituloy AngSulong is all about but a quick look at this Blog and all is revealed.  The Term was chosen as a unique phrase for an SEO Contest.  The Idea of an SEO contest was a bit foreign to me but a quick read and all was revealed.  The Idea of the contest is to get a particular site to feature high in the SERPS (Search engine Results pages) in a fixed amount of time - usually 3 to 6 months.  At the end of the Contest prizes are awarded to the site owners for the sites that are in certain places in the SERPS.  I didn’t realise that such contests were popular and with prizes for some contests being several thousand dollars, no wonder they are popular!

Now the BlueSEO Blog is not just about the contest, but I guess at the moment it is a fairly high priority.  The posts read ok, and the info within them seems pretty sound.  The  Philippine Weblog gets fairly regular updates, which is what you expect from a blog.  They also have a web directory as part of their site.

The site itself is using Wordpress for the Blog and phpLD for the directory and they have done a pretty good job integrating the design so both the blog and directory look the same.  Quite often, sites use several different scripts but all too frequently they look different, but they have ensured that all parts of their site look the same.

Visit www.blueseo.com

Nearly of of us in our work life answer to someone, and if you are anything like me you probably question the competence of the person who is your boss or Manager.  Rather than just complain about him or her there are things that you can do.  But, before you do anything, wander over to to the Leadership501 Blog and read up on their leadership resources.  You might just get some sort of insight into why your boss thinks the way he does, but it is more likely that you will quickly come to realise that his or her leadership skills are just not up to scratch!  You would have to be one of the lucky ones if this is not the case.

The Leadership501 site is part of the 501 network, of which we will look more closely at over upcoming days. This site promises info and help for people to become more efficient in a leadership position.  A look at the topics and the count of articles in each gives an indication that the topics cover a fairly broad range of subjects from education, leadership motivation, resources and teamwork to mention a few.

I took a quick look at the latest article to be posted on the front page which is titled Functional Leadership Model.  I really had no idea what a Functional leadership Model is but the article was easy to read and clearly explained what it is all about.  Onto the 2nd article.  Once again, the article was fairly easy to read and presented what I thought to be pretty good info.  The 2 articles seem to be a reasonable balance of quality and provide a reasonable degree of information on their topic.

So, with these article seeming pretty good, I randomly selected another article from the middle of the last viewed list.  The chosen article happened to be Management Systems.  After reading the first 2 articles I was full of hope and anticipation about this one.  It, like the other articles was well written, stayed on topic, but unlike the other articles had very little actual substance and information.  I got to the end and couldn’t find the page 2 button that I was expecting.  Well, I understand a little about the subject and that is possibly why it didn’t meet my expectations.

With 2 out of the 3 articles I read, this site looks like it would be useful for someone with little to no management skills or training and possibly an OK resource for people with experience and wanting to brush up a little on current infor and trends.  Have a read for yourself and you decide.

Visit www.leadership501.com