David Lebovitz / Organic To Be

I first visited David Lebovitz's blog. The first thing I noticed was the large image of cheese accompanying the first blog post, which immediately grabbed my attention and drew me to the post. Unfortunately, after a few seconds, an ad popped-up and starting playing music, which distracted me from the content of the post.

After closing the ad, I went back to reading the first post. Titled "Warm Baked Goat Cheese," silly me expected to read about warm baked goat cheese. However, most of the post is about living in France, which I found pretty boring. It's not until the recipe at the very end does the author even mention warm baked goat cheese.

Before continuing on with the posts, I took a minute to look over the rest of the website. The right half of the page, divided into two narrow columns, is very cluttered. The images linking to the author's books on Amazon are too small and are hard to read. There are even more ads mixed in with the category and recent entries links and other potentially useful information. If the author is selling books and possibly getting kick-backs from Amazon for saying he uses the featured products, it's very unprofessional to have third-party ads at all.

On a more positive note, the other pages, such as "About" and "Links," are very helpful. The About page is very impressive, and really boosts the author's credibility. The Links page could be useful, but is overwhelming. It would be much more useful if the author provided descriptions about each blog.

The other blog I visited was Organic To Be. Reading the title at the top of my browser ("Organic Recipes Blog, Organic Food, Small Organic Garden Farms, Edible Landscapes"), I expected the content to be similar to the other blogs we've evaluated over the last few days. However, the posts seemed to be personal stories rather than information about organic foods. I'm not saying that's a bad thing - the authors seem to be very good writers - it just doesn't go with the theme of the blog. If that is what you are looking for, then I think this blog is very good.

I can't say much about the site itself. It seems very well put together. The links on the left and along the top give the site instant credibility with lots of useful information about the authors. The website is simple: it doesn't have resources or links to books like David Lebovitz's. Again, this isn't a bad thing - this blog is simple and does what it is trying to well.