This post is an entry for the Review The Symposium and Win! Contest at The Symposium (Nanashi-inc.net).

The Symposium is a WordPress-powered book review blog, has all the makings of a great site. It is easy to read, easy to navigate, and accessible through your favorite RSS feed reader.

The aesthetics (images) manage to take a back seat to the articles, being not the least bit distracting while reading the articles themselves, which are quite witty and really sell the book. Even if a particular book wasn’t rated very highly, Joana, the site’s author, manages to keep a neutral, professional tone.

Each article has a lovely, concise description of the story, just enough to entice the reader to find out more about the book. Individual articles also contain a handy link to the Amazon.com page for the book, as well as pricing information from Amazon. Articles are usually kept short, no more than 5 paragraphs, but the reader hardly notices the length of the post due to Joana’s amazing writing technique, which keeps the reader drawn in until the very last word.

The default theme features fonts which are large enough to read on resolutions larger than 1024×768, good contrast for the visually impaired, minimal use of color, and is light on images, reducing load time for the users still stuck on 28 kbps dial-up connections. Another feature which is helpful to users is the ability to switch themes. If a user does not like the current theme they can switch between the three available to use on the site. All themes on the site retain the large fonts and accessible style.

Though the site itself features ads, they are unobtrusive and at the bottom of the page. The button exchanges (rotations) are kept off to the sidebar and down pretty far, allowing the site user unblocked access to the navigation.

The Symposium is the book review section of your local newspaper 2.0. It’s a completely user-friendly web guide to modern literature that only needs one more thing: more posts.