That’s a loose translation of Sembang Komputer, a site belonging to Muhammad Khairul, who is one of top 3 commentators at Blogjer for the month of March 2008. As part of the threesome contest, he will get a review by me.

Overview

Overall, I like the theme’s look and feel. Clean, simple and with white backgrounds. I always love sites with white background, so you can’t blame me for liking his one too. Everything is nicely in place except for the space taken by the RSS button and email subscription box.

This is a good example of a niche blog. A blog about internet, softwares and computer tips, and it reminds me a lot of my friend’s blog, Amanz.Net. Anyway, I will not do a comparison of both blogs. There’s not many tech site in Bahasa Malaysia and I really applaud his effort to maintain such site. His writing is easy to understand, but coming from a person with an IT background, it is not fair to say that. The best way to find out is to get someone who is new to computing to read a post and comment. You should do that MK and rate your own site.

Monetize

I will not touch on PR, Alexa, and other Rankings as these information can be easily extracted by the tools available free on the net, but I would like to touch on monetizing. That make sense since my blog is partly about making money online.

Other than having a clean blog, I can’t find any single advertisement on his blog. Either he is not interested to make money or he is waiting for the right moment to introduce ads to his blog. Maybe. Even I waited a few months before introducing adsense on this blog, but whatever the reason, there’s no harm to try to make money. There’s already a few Malaysian Online Advertising companies which he can join, particularly NuffNang and Advertlets. He could also put some affiliate link of some Malay ebooks out there on technical stuff such as FTP and Upgrading WordPress.

I may sound like a person interested only in money, but we are living in the 21st century and money does play a big part of our life. Why not let other people pay your domain and hosting, and also maybe your cup of teh tarik every morning?

Traffic

Being a niche blog, the traffic to his blog is quite low. Maybe because the blog is barely 6 months old. I can see that he has done a few things to enhance his blog visibility to the search engines i.e in his permalinks structure, google sitemap and all-in-one-seo-pack plugins, but he is missing the basics that is tag and ping. Try SimpleTags.

Notable Post

I find his post on Setting Up WordPress on Your PC very interesting. With the release of WordPress 2.5, I am sure there is a few of you who feel that maybe it is too early to upgrade. If you can’t afford to install another wordpress blog on your domain for testing, then you should consider setting it up on your PC. Perfect to be used as a sandbox, but not sure whether it support 2.5 though.

That’s about it. Then again, my opinion might not be the same to what he has on his mind regarding the future of his blog. But the basics of blogging is to tell the world that you have one and get the most exposure that you can (making money at the same time is a big plus).

What do you think?

[tags]computer tips, review, contest, winner, ads, 21st century, internet, software, computer tips[/tags]