Blog Review: Simple Makes

Lori from Simple Makes contacted me for a blog review, asking me to help her from an objective outside perspective. Here’s some of what I told her.

First, I love your content and your writing. It’s very clear and original and you communicate your ideas effectively. I like the clean white design of your blog (I’m a big fan of white designs obviously), and you always choose good pictures to illustrate your posts. You also make good use of tags. You have a great picture on your about page and appropriate stuff in your amazon shop.

Now, on to the tweaking!

In your Amazon shop, you should be able to have a link going back to the site. Put it in- you don’t want readers to forget where they came from. I would also change the colors so that they are the same as your site.

She’s reworked her shop, and I think she’s done a great job at personalizing the shop and choosing items to stock it.

Combine your about pages into one: who you are, where you came from, why you moved to China, why you started the blog, what you hope to do in the future, what you want the blog to be, etc etc. You have an interesting story just by the fact of being in China- people will want to know more about it. I love your ‘Simplicity?’ page- it would be great to find a way to combine that with the ‘About’ page. The thing is that the ‘About’ page is one of the first that people click on when visiting a site for the first time, so you need to have it, but asking the question ‘Simplicity’ is good too.

You should have a widget in your sidebar with ‘categories’ or tags or ‘What I write about’. Try to keep it to fewer than 10 categories.

Not only did she rework her categories, she added nifty images as buttons!

You have this gorgeous, simple, calm, reposing site and a HUGE jarring Amazon ad is the first thing you see right above the header. Get rid of it! It sends the message that this site is about advertising, which is obviously not what you want to say. Put text ads in between posts, and at the foot of the page. One in the sidebar is OK too.

Lori had no idea that at the top of her lovely, calm, white blog on simplicity was a huge red banner ad- she had turned banners off in her computer! This serves as a lesson for us all. Make sure to periodically check your blog from other computers, in other browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, IE etc) to see what other people are seeing.

I think you should rethink your sidebar. What you WANT is to keep people on your blog. What you are DOING is sending them away, because you have links to a whole bunch of other stuff. Put your favorite blogs in a separate page in the nav bar. The Amazon ad in the sidebar is too big- use a smaller, text based button.

This is another hot button topic for all of us. It is hard enough making our blog’s content ’sticky’ enough to attract and keep new readers without sending them away from our blog to read someone else’s. Blogrolls are fine and good- I have them myself- but keep them on a separate page.

Lori’s content always shone, but the end result of this blog tweaking (and that’s all it really was) is that now her content doesn’t have to compete with her blog layout, her blog layout supports her content.