Free Blog Sites: Spruz

So promising, and then… nothing.

I read about Spruz on Go2Web2 earlier this afternoon.  It sounded like a great site!  I’d never heard of it before, so I was pretty excited.  It sounded like there were a ton of customization features that could create not just a blog, but a whole social networking site built around a blog.

And then I actually tried it.

The landing page offers you a chance to “Reserve your domain” even before you logon.  Unfortunately, this was a waste of time, because this information is apparently thrown out when you go through the steps to sign up a new account.  You will be asked to enter the subdomain of your choice again, this time with a verification program that might tell you the name you entered previously is taken.

After confirming the account, I was taken to the theme selection screen,  where my heart sank a little.  I was expecting some serious customization options.  Instead I was presented with thirty-five awfully hideous themes.  There was not one theme there I even kinda liked.  I selected the plain black, white, and silver theme just because it was slightly better than the canary yellow theme, the second best option.

After selecting the them, you are asked for more sign-up info, including the subdomain (again) you want.  After that… well, I wish I could say it got better, but I received “Service Unavailable” errors several times at this point.

I did finally get in, however.   The setup wizard might be popular with some people, but I didn’t care for it.  A Flash-based walk-through for using a service that is already very simplistic just annoyed me.  No way to skip it, it seems.  This line at the bottom of the setup screen really made me happy:  ” This site has been optimized for Internet Explore 7.”  To my Linux-running Firefox-fanboy self, a warning like that means “Our site is badly programmed, but IE’s ok with it.  Firefox complains about our bugs, but we don’t care.” I only noticed that warning because Spruz froze up after I entered a page description and I had to repeat the wizard.

After completing the wizard, there is another theme library from which to choose the look of your website.  While there are around 90 themes to choose from overall, most are still hideous.  The game-related themes are a little better, but they are not at all appropriate unless your site is somehow related to that game.

When I tried to edit the content of my blog, I was presented with an unreadable page, medium grey text on a background featuring medium grey and light grey diagonal stripes, with slightly-darker-than-medium grey buttons.  My eyes are pretty sharp, but this page was giving me a headache.  I gave up after a couple of minutes of trying to figure out how to write an actual blog entry and decided to leave it blank.

In their rush to make buttons and menus that anyone could use, I found the whole thing slightly confusing and painful.  Maybe it’s the engineer in me, but software that tries to hard to be easy just ends up harder to use than the common design most software uses.  Here’s a clue, guys… most software is designed that way for a reason!  Stop trying to reinvent the GUI; it’s not necessary.

Beyond the site-building interface, there’s not much to like.  In the end, you have a hideous blog with advertising plastered across the top.  Even if a newbie blogger liked the admin menus, I can’t imagine they’d be happy about the end result.  You can do much better with the easy-to-use admin interface at Blogger, for example.

The host is very slow: average load times for my zero-content test page were eight to eleven seconds.  According to a load time indicator at the bottom of the screen, all database accesses were taking less than one second.  The advertising image is only 12.2kb, so I’m going to have to blame the pipes for the load times.  Their network connection is probably being overtaxed by serving out that Flash setup wizard.

I’m very sorry to say that this is probably the worst free blog host I’ve ever seen.  I absolutely can not recommend Spruz for anyone, including the absolute beginners for whom it was designed.  Great idea, horrible execution.

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