Hey everybody.

First things first, there’s this site called ReviewMe, and if you sign up with them people can ask you to review their site for a fee. This is the first review I’ve done, so tell me if you like it.

Today I’ll be talking about PresidentElectionPolls.com. The site describes itself as “a website dedicated towards archiving polling results for the 2008 general election.” And while I found that to be true, and that the site can be quite useful, there are some things you should know before you add it to your blogroll.

THE PLUSES:
The first thing you notice when you visit is that the front page is FULL of links to polls results and links to poll results. This is great because connecting people with great content is ultimately what any good site should be about. I’m sure I’ll be visiting this site now just for this fact alone.

Moreover, even though it looks like a link farm, it’s not. If you click on a certain poll’s link it sends you to an internal page that shows a variety of poll results over a span of time. Again, this is great for people who like to do trend spotting, and if polls are about anything it’s that.

The site also features a lot of different permutations of polling. They have polls by state, polls by candidate matchups and a few other different types. The point being is they really live up to their name, so a big thumbs up on this one.

So what about content other than polls? Well, they have that too.

The Daily News Stories section has a good number of links to various stories about each candidate. And considering it has been updated pretty much daily since late September you can most likely count on it as a good daily source for stories about polls.

Also, there was one other thing I really liked about this site and it was its Electoral Vote Calculator. A lot of sites have Flash based calculators, but this one is so much simpler. Just change the party in a state from R to D or vice versa and the total updates. Easy and simple.

So those are the good things about PresidentElectionPolls.com.

Now let’s look at some things they could be doing better.

THE MINUSES:
First, there’s no RSS feed! What??? That’s a big no-no in the blogging world. In fact, I wouldn’t really even call this site a blog, and they didn’t claim to be a blog, but any political site worth its salt these days at least has an RSS feed. So if there’s any advice I could give to them it is, well, yeah…get an RSS feed post haste.

Another big minus is the ad placement. Obviously I’m all for monetizing a site, but a lot of the prime real estate at the top is populated with Google Adsense banners. Frankly, they should focus on filling those spaces with content, growing traffic and then integrating ad solutions that can really harness the traffic they’ve built. Especially since Adsense doesn’t pay squat. Also, and this is just an aesthetic thing, but all of those ads in such close proximity make the site look cheap and for such an information driven site that really hurts its credibility.

One last thing I’d recommend taking a hard look at is using their 3 column format more effectively. Because on the front page at least there’s hardly any content in the side columns. That’s a shame and it makes the site look kind of sparse as you make your way down the page. I think this has to do with the fact that they’re not using blogging software, because if they were they could cut the content off at a certain point and link to a “Page 2″. They don’t do that here and it really hurts the readability and flow.

So that leads me to…

CONCLUSION:
On a scale of 1 to 10, I give PresidentElectionPolls.com a solid 5. It’s not very pretty to look at, but there’s a lot of content and I think I’ll at least check it on a weekly basis.

So should you add it to your blogroll? Not yet. But put it in your bookmarks and if they get an RSS feed and adopt a more blog friendly format and look, maybe you should reconsider.

AND THEN…
Hope this has helped and if you want to take a look at their site and give your comments, please do. I’m sure they’ll appreciate the feedback.