Mobile Moment Monday: Under Thumb Blog

Mobile Awesomeness Logo courtesy of Mobile Awesomeness

I started looking at some other blogs focused on mobile design and came across a interesting website that shares some of the same ideas and concepts that I do called Mobile Awesomeness (MA). They take what I have been doing here on Mobile Moment Mondays a step further by dedicating their entire website to "ranking" mobile design and apps.

MA has invented their own rating system based on three categories: UI/UX, Design, and Concept.  You receive a numeric score in each category, in which 100% awesomeness is the goal to achieve.  A few of the things that they base your score on include easy of use, load time, innovation, user-flow, first impression, creativity, imagery, look and feel, content, complexity, problem solving, and application.

Screenshot of rankings from Mobile Awesomeness project rankings

The homepage is MA's Mobile Gallery, which is a gallery of links to mobile projects that they have critiqued and ranked.  They have a link that explains their rating system, an about section that explains their purpose (quite well I must add), and then their blog.

Screenshot of Mobile Awesomeness website goals.

Since I am in the blogging business, their blog is what I mostly wanted to reflect upon since they are kind of like my competition (in which I am more like their competition because they already have a well established website and been around for a while).  Their blog goes by another title called Under Thumb, with a catchy little blog description that simple states "Your source for all things mobile" (already impressed me).  What I like about this blog is how it is set-up a lot like my own.  In the right side column of the page there are category links, recent posts links, and then the archives.

Each post leads with a image, then the title, and then the date of the post at the bottom of the article.  The main blog page is actually a feed of all the blog articles and when you click on the blog title, or "Read more..." link, you are taken to the article page, which is styled with larger fonts and then the title is placed above the leading image.

Much like my own blog, their blog has "theme days," such as the Mobile Monday Roundup and Friday Link Dumps, and then they have regular posts of interest.  Thier blog started in August 2013. Most articles are titled wittily and a majority of the images catch the viewers attention.

What I do not like about the MA blog is that there is no real "About This Blog" section explaining the purpose, the writer, or anything.  There is a blog post back in August of 2013 that welcomes the user to Under Thumb, but there is no link to it.  There are no labels for SEO purposes or to benefit the viewer in finding key terms.

There is also nothing that tells me who the author is for all these articles. I searched through and read a lot of the articles and not once did I feel like the writer was interacting with his audience, in which it showed at the bottom of each article because not one person has wrote any comments. There are sharing options for each, but not many of the articles have been shared either. What surprises me about this is that their website shows up at the top of Google's search ranks, so I am assuming that they have an audience.

Of course my blog does not get a lot of commenters either (hint, hint).  This makes me think that the viewers of my blog, which could essentially be the viewers of the Under Thumb blog, are not that many by volume, or no one has any interest in reading about mobile design concepts. Let me know if I am wrong below! And check out the blog at Mobile Awesomeness, let me know what you think, and let me know how I can do to improve my own.  I am always up for content suggestions.  Thanks for reading again this week.