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This post has been written with the intent of getting a free back link thanks to Tyler Cruz’s “back links for site reviews” promotion.

I have been subscribed to Tyler Cruz’s RSS feed for a while now, ever since he made a thread on SitePoint about moving out of his parents’ house and was talked into starting a personal blog.

Although Tyler is a good writer, and does a good job of speaking his opinion, I don’t think he always has the right mindset. Many of the posts he has made have been selfish in nature. He has always said that he doesn’t mean to brag, that he is only trying to motivate other people by letting them know what is possible. I feel that his blog could be a lot better if he spent more time helping others rather than always having an agenda to improve his own business.

With that being said, you can’t blame the guy for taking an interest in his business. I still subscribe to this internet entrepreneur RSS feed because his posts can be entertaining and he does occasionally offer some good advice. Some of my favorite posts that Tyler has written include:

Now, some technical details about the site. The design makes his blog easy to read and seems to be working well for him. There are a few things that bother me though:

First, I think Tyler should install the WordPress plugins Optimal Title or All In One SEO Pack so that his titles appear before the blog name. This is not only a search engine issue, but also a usability issue. When I have multiple tabs of his site open in FireFox, I can’t distinguish them because they all say the same thing.

The second suggestion I have is that there should be a definitive archive page or sitemap with post titles only. It is nice to be able to quickly scan all of the posts on a blog without having to sort through clutter. I don’t currently have one on DerekBeau.com because there are only a couple posts, but I am in the process of setting it up. A sitemap can be generated very easily with the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator plugin for WordPress.

Other than that, I would just like to complement Tyler for sticking to his blog for so long (even after he himself was ready to call it quits) and building such a large readership. Good job Tyler!