The Creative Nerd.  I love the title of this blog. It’s so, so… creative and at the same time so, so…. nerdy! This blog chronicles the nerdy, everyday life of Tina. Tina lives with her husband, Chris (who is also a blogger), and her three cats. You begin by wondering what on earth can be so compelling so as to maintain a blog, but her stories and topics of discussion are quite interesting, and not mundane at all! I love a good story- I’m always asking my husband to tell me another one– and I enjoy reading Tina’s blog. She’s definitely got a creative bent, and her memes are really fun reading.

If I had a beef about this great blog, it is the theme. It is extremely unreadable. I say this with a little apprehension, because I like Tina and I like her blogging. But the theme makes it very difficult to decipher her content, and I fear she loses readership from this.

The theme reminds me of Windows 3.1. It’s blocky, gray, and has Courier font (shudder). I’m not much of a nerd– I’ve always been much too whimsical– but this theme is downright NERDY. Now, nerdy is not necessarily “bad.” You can have a blueblood nerdy theme and that’s fine; but if you have a nerdy/ugly blog, you just won’t attract many readers because so few people (nerds are a rare breed today) will read it. But Tina’s stories are worth reading. So, I think the theme should be a lot less nerdy. There’s no need to embellish it on par with ornamental Cadillac grills (heh heh), but adding some color, some rounded edges (or just getting rid of all those corners), and a better font would work wonders. The theme loads very quickly, which is a plus, but it takes such effort to read once it’s loaded! It is a testament to her writing that I maintain my composure and patiently slog through the font and gray colors to read her posts. I like the writing, but it is too painful to make out the content.

Writing a comment is a nerdy experience, too. I’m not a proponent of those “captcha” type boxes. See, I have poor vision and those nasty little numbers and letters frustrate the stuffin’s outta me. I usually have to enter the information three, four, FIVE times before I get it right. Blogs are interactive, by nature. You can have a non-interactive blog, absolutely, but if you blog so that others might read and comment on your content, it is very much in your favor to make the process as enjoyable as possible. I’m not alone in this. I’ve seen lots of people rant about Google’s Blogger captchas– those things are the WORST. Small-time bloggers really should consider ridding the captcha, and opt for weeding out spam by hand. I know it’s a pain. It’s merely a suggestion from a full-time blog reader and comment-writer. :) Those little things make all the difference.

Also, comments do not appear until they are moderated. This is unusual, and adds more to the Iron Curtain aspect of the blog. And when I click on the header to take me back from a single post to the home page, the blog opens in a new window. This is user-unfriendly. I believe this can be fixed by removing the “javascript:window.open” coding in the header area.

Overall, Tina’s good content is being drowned out by the distracting theme, the poor readability, and some little quirks in coding. This makes the blog-reading experience sharply downgraded. I’d like to see this blog take off, and I think it can, easily. This blog is too heavy on the “nerd” and too light on “creative.” A few graphic and coding changes can transform The Creative Nerd from a little homely blog into a popular homily blog!