making a blog – context and specific problem

When you first visit a website, the person looks for a specific solution to a problem, and also whether the context is correct for them .

The thing is, that, well, when i go to something like matthew gemmel's site, he seems irish, and i don't think the context works for me, nothing that particular to me, mostly words, about stuff i do not care about too much, kinda too specific and it is unclear what he is writing about... is he writing about writing, is he writing about tech, is he sharing fiction?

but when i go to brooksreview, he seems american, a tech worker, probably around my age, and interested in gear. and he writes about the best gear, and then he has a weekly newsletter with ephemera.

the second one makes more sense to me, then i can see that in the past brooksreview wrote about lots of other articles and privacy and stuff, but has since moved all of that to the weekly newsletter, so the main part of the website is all about gear.

so you could have that setup.

a focus on the main content of the site, and ephemera on the weekly newsletter, which actually does come out weekly. that is why it works. when i scroll through, the website makes sense. the value proposition is, here is the best stuff, so you can compare against it, from someone who really cares about the best stuff, and you can decide if you actually want the best stuff, or just hear about it, and get something else for yourself.

something like eric kim well i know the articles are all going to be about, well, photography, and entrepreneurship. the and entrepreneurship is why i keep coming back to his site, the psychology, because, all other photography sites, well, they are not about that stuff.

i do suppose, though, that if i was a different person, the matthew gemmel site would really resonate with me, i just want to say that. he has a following, and a readership, so what i am concentrating on is not some absolute scale of whether the site is good or bad. what i am concentrating on is the experience of the reader, arriving on a site, and establishing whether he or she will read it and continue.

all in all, it is good to have diverse sites that appeal specifically to specific people. in fact, that is probably all that works best.

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