Carroll 3.1

The site I will be critiquing is an urban bicycling site I visit often called Urbanvelo.org.

Navigation
Urbanvelo wants visitors to come to the site as a hub of information on urban cycling. The main page is the blog, however, there are seven main pages at the top of the screen. Each has the same navigation at the top of the screen. These pages are "Magazine Downloads," "Subscribe," "Merchandise," "Blog," "Product Reviews," "Product News," and "Contact." If we assume that they placed these links in descending order of importance, than we learn a lot about urbanvelo: they are foremost a magazine; they want the blog readers to go to the magazine and subscribe, view, and download the magazine before (or as) they view the blog. They also want to sell their products, which consist mainly of t-shirts and stickers, before people read their blog or at the very least they want the blog readers to be constantly reminded of the magazine and the merchandise. We can also see that they understand their audience very well. The blog contains links to news stories, videos, and interesting stuff that is (sometimes loosely) related to biking. But at the top of the page they give two more options for how to read the blog "Product reviews" and "Product news." They know that many visitors to the blog only really care about what is new and hot in the world of urban cycling. So they give their readers the chance to see only what they want without wading through other blog entries. This site knows what is it for and who visits it and they make the experience very user friendly.
One glaring downfall is that all the links open up in the same window. When I navigate away from Urbanvelo, and view the contents of another site, I may have to click the back button up to 15 times or more just to get back to Urbanvelo and then renavigate back to where I was in the blog (which is annoying if I've fallen behind and have two or three pages to read). This is also a problem for Urbanvelo. One of the main uses of their site (for me at least) is to use the sponsored links down the right side of the home page to visit other manufacturers of biking products. When I do so, and the link opens in the same window, I have to repeat click back to Urbanvelo so many times I get frustrated and stop.
Aside from that, the navigation is consistent, logical and easy to use.

Page Layouts
Urbanvelo's site relies highly on the accepted blog convention of heavy vertical-scrolling pages. This is a problem for sites in which you want to get all the vital information quickly, but works well for leisurely browsing sites like Urbanvelo. Most visitors to the site know that they will be doing a lot of vertical scrolling, so there's no problem that the long list of sponsors on the right side goes down for quite some time. I am already willing as a visitor to scroll for more information, because that's how blogs work.

Consistency
As I mentioned above, the navigation at the top is consistent, as well as the footer and the links down the side, which include links to featured articles, recent comments made by visitors, links to urbanvelo sites outside of the main site (like Facebook pages), and the sponsored links. These are all consistent on the main six pages. Only the information in the center window changes. This consistency doesn't work for pages without a lot of information like the "Merchandise" and "Contact" pages because without enough information to get the reader to scroll down, they won't see half of the links available to them. However, this problem is minimal as most users will use the main page to navigate to other links.
Also every link that requires the visitor click on a picture also has a text link that takes them to the same place. This redundancy is always a good idea.

Tone and Voice
The editors know what they are talking about and it shows, which works well because most visitors to the site are coming for well-informed reviews and synopsis of important events in the urban cycling world. Most posts are written in the second person and refer to themselves many times. There are times, however, that the talk get jargon heavy; for example, they assume the reader would know what a press-in bottom bracket converter would be. They balance this well though, with many of the posts being basic maintenance how-tos for those with less experience with the jargon. The writers are familiar with the audience, which when backed up with solid knowledge, makes for a very inviting and informative experience.