SITE DESCRIPTION

AskMen.com is, as it’s tag line states, a free men’s online magazine. Amazingly, the site has attempted to, and has been pretty much successful at placing all the information found in a full, print magazine right on its homepage. Of course you’ll have to link through to get to many of the articles, but for the most part the magazine’s table of contents is available at all times in the left sidebar.

The site is very colorful and filled with photos making it appealing to the eye. And, being a site for men, knows exactly how to get their attention. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a photo that’s not of either a beautiful woman, a car, or a famous athlete or musician. This, of course, keeps the men coming back, and AskMen does a great job of refreshing the content on a daily basis.

The sidebar is split into about 13 different channels, ranging from dating and love to health and sports, to power and money. Each channel has its own homepage and on the homepage is an archive of helpful articles in that topic. The archive goes back months, maybe years, so there is no shortage of information available.

In addition to the regularly added articles are daily features such as gossip of the day, joke of the day, and gadget of the day.

ABOUT ASKMEN.COM

On their about page AskMen provides a history of milestones the site has reached. According to their summary, the original concept for the site was created in April of 1999. Less than ten years later, the site’s header boasts 5 million readers a month (though at the time of this review, their actual statistics were more than 6 million per month). They’ve been able to build such a faithful following by sticking closely to their mission to “offer men candid advice, that is useful practical and entertaining”.

Some of the statistics available (at the time of review) on the about page are amazing:

• Visitors average 4.5 minutes on the site per visit
• 13 million readers have bookmarked AskMen.com
• AskMen.com has 34.58% of the market share for those interested in content related to men’s lifestyle, ahead of Maxim Online (17.09%), FHM (6.85%), and Men’s Health (5.62%).

WHAT WE LIKED

AskMen offers fresh content, interesting thoughts and ideas, accurate facts and research, and plenty of high quality pictures of beautiful women. From the onset this site seems to be a man’s dream. And after further review, we weren’t disappointed.

The topics are right on for what men like, and the articles are interesting enough to peel a guy’s eyes away from the famous Top 99 Women lists long enough for him to actually read them and get something out of it.

A favorite feature of ours is the best of the week listing on the right sidebar of the home page. This widget has the week’s most popular articles listed for easy access. More links to recent articles can also be found at the bottom of the home page, under the heading sections and recent articles.

Most importantly, AskMen has daily updates, which is typically uncommon for magazine sites. They benefit with continued traffic, and users benefit with enormous amounts of quality content.

WHAT WE DIDN’T LIKE

In order for AskMen to include as much as they have on the homepage, they had to sacrifice somewhere.  Unfortunately, they chose to make the content column relatively small. When you’re reading an article, the content is bordered by ads that are nearly as wide as the white space where the article is. It’s not way too small, and actually reading is sometimes easier if the column is smaller, but the ads along the right hand side can be a bit distracting.

This problem is nicely offset by the dark background on the navigation bar (left side) and the dark ads (right side), making the content column stand out a little bit more with its white background.

THE FINAL WORD

If you like the popular newsstand men’s magazines and/or you’re a male, you should definitely make visiting AskMen a habit.

www.AskMen.com