Blog Page Critique: Spoonfed Baby

Welcome to another page critique! About pages, PR pages, product pages and so on are critical in helping you meet your bloggy goals. Each week I dissect a page on someone’s blog as a way to refine it into being more awesome. Read, learn and apply these tips to the important pages on your own blog. Here we go!

Blog: Spoonfed Baby

Blogger: Sarah

Page: Start Here page

In a nutshell, Sarah says her blog is a baby blog. It started as a journey through making homemade baby food but grew into more than that. She mainly blogs about playtime ideas, recipes, products she loves and tips and tricks of navigating raising a child, but likes to keep a focus on helping with making baby food. She hopes that her blog can become a place for moms to visit and get ideas for playing, cooking, and making life easier. Sarah plans to share posts on trying new recipes and post more about baby food when she has a second child, but for now she wants readers to be able to refer back to her blog as they make their own food (and get some playtime ideas as well). With this page Sarah said she struggles with making it interesting and appealing, yet getting information across. She also wonders if it’s grouped well or is too wordy.

Visual:

• Visually, I like how organized the content looks at first glance. It isn’t overwhelming to look at, which is a good thing.
• While this is more of an overall design suggestion, it affects this page as well. I think the top portion of your blog is a little busy. The big reason is that the patterned background peeks through between the different design elements at the top of your page. Another reason is that at the top of the page you have three design elements in a row with the same font (menu bar, Start Here promo strip, and this page’s heading). I’d change the Start Here strip to a simpler font. While it may seem like a more decorative font would stand out more, when it’s surrounded by that font, there’s not really enough contrast.
• When it comes to food, images really do matter. This page is a little plain and using images will definitely make it more enticing for someone to click on a recipe or post. A photo in each section would help guide the eye down through the page. Just make sure the photo is rather large– wide enough to nearly fill up the width of your blog.

Navigation:

• I think you’re doing a great job linking to this page in the not-so-obvious ways. You have a special bar dedicated to it and you even have it linked from your Facebook page. Awesome!
• You also have this page linked from your About page, but I noticed it’s kind of buried within a paragraph. One of the first places a visitor might go is to your About page so make the link to your Start Here page stand out more. Put it in a separate paragraph or use the blockquotes formatting (the quote icon when you’re writing a post). You might even try a color or making it bold.
• You might also consider adding the button towards the bottom of your sidebar. Someone might be reading a post all the way through and notice it while towards the bottom of your page, versus having to scroll all the way back up.

Content:

• You’ve done a great job. Like I mentioned before, visually the content isn’t overwhelming. It’s great that you’ve broken your page down into sections too.
• I like this a lot: “Depending on where you are in your ‘I make my own baby food’ journey, check out my tips below.” This lets the reader know that they’ll find something useful, regardless of if they’re a newbie or not.
• I notice you link to the Ins and Outs post in two places. It seems to make more sense though in the how-to section. I think a post on how you got started in making baby food might be a good addition to the “considering making baby food?” heading or something similar.
• Overall it might be helpful to add a short description for each post. Even a single sentence could be the difference in getting a reader to click over or not.
• You did a great job nudging the reader to subscribe with the heading “Need new baby food ideas?”
• I like how you get a reader to continue on to other posts with the graphic navigation buttons at the end. My only suggestion is that the text is rather small on those images. Consider removing your URL so you have more space to make the other text bigger. I would keep your URL on most types of images but these are more like navigation buttons so I don’t think they need them.

Let me know your thoughts on the critique in the comments below. If you have an extra moment, head over to Spoon Fed Baby and give Sarah some comment love.