Blog Page Critique: Counting My Kisses

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: Counting My Kisses

Blogger: Amy

Page: The Kiss List

Amy’s tagline is “Life, love & sweet kisses from my kids” – and that’s exactly what she writes about. She tries to stay positive no matter what, even on the “OMG my-children-are-driving-me-insane” posts.

The Kiss List is designed to be a home for all of her readers’ most popular posts and her personal favorites too. She wants it to be easy page to navigate. She hopes The Kiss List can become a one-stop shop for new readers, or regular readers who have some time & want to enjoy posts. She struggles with how much & how often to update it as well as how many posts are TOO many to feature. She also struggles with promoting it and wonders if people know what the page is when they land on it. She thinks it’s a cool page but is unsure how to maximize it.

Visual:

• From a design standpoint, I love the look of the images for each section of the posts. I think the way the post title comes up when you mouse over the image is a nice detail as well.
• Good choice on making this page fit the entire page versus having a sidebar. This really helps maximize the space and draw the focus into these posts.
• While I like The Kiss List font, I feel the subheadings (“love letters” etc) take over because they are bold and black while your main page title is a thinner font. I think making those headings a larger font size would solve that.
• Although I do love the images, I feel like this page is a little overwhelming for someone. There are over 70 posts to choose from! In my part of the Blog Design presentation I did at Type A Parent conference, I mentioned a study about choice. The more choices people were given, the less likely they were to take action (see slide 32 in our presentation). I’d pare them down to one row per category. If you wanted to add some more, do so a few extra as text links and give them teasers: “The most comments ever on a post: {LINK}” or “You’ll never believe what happened during our vacation: {LINK}.” But again, I do think 70 posts is too many to chose from so keep it light..

Navigation:

• You already have navigation to this page from two important places: your nav menu and your About page. Nice!
• In your email to me, you mentioned that you link to this page in relevant posts (like a post about Disney links to this page which has Disney posts). That’s great! You also asked if linking to this page in a welcome page would be effective. I say “YES!” I use the What Would Seth Godin Do? plugin and you can easily customize the text for the message.
• I’d also add a button to your sidebar!
• While I think the name The Kiss List is cute (and it ties into your blog), I think it might not be descriptive enough and a new visitor might be confused as to what it means. I do think that if you added a button to your sidebar that was a little more descriptive “New here? Start with The Kiss List,” that would be a good solution. Also, on the actual page, tie the name into your page. Is it that readers love these posts so much they want to “kiss” them? I’m a little unsure why it’s called a Kiss List (other than the name tie in) so maybe a fun way to describe it could help people understand the page’s purpose a little better.
• The way your photos show the blog post title when you hover over it is definitely cool and looks great. From a navigation perspective though, you rely a lot of readers to mouse over each one to find something they want to read. While I’m never one for adding too much text to a page, I think some of the helpful posts, like the Baby Essentials posts, don’t get the attention they deserve. Perhaps you could call out certain posts in that particular section’s intro text so readers know to look for them. For example, your Disneyworld section focuses on you sharing your family’s experience, yet there are tips for people going to Disney in there too. Try to call them out a little more in the intro.

Content:

• I think it’s great that you don’t have long paragraphs of text and stick to the premise of the page: to highlight posts.
• One theme I notice throughout the page is that you use a lot of first person. “I,” “my,” “our,” and so on. While of course it’s your blog and you write about YOUR stories, when you’re trying to entice people to read, you need to put yourself in the reader’s shoes and ask “what’s in it for me?”For example, you say: “Words of adoration for my sweet preschooler, loving toddler & amazing husband. I can only hope one day they look back on these letters and know just how deeply I love them! A few of my most heartfelt posts can be found here.” The big question is WHY should a visitor read these posts? Flip it around to relate to your reader: “Have you ever written letters to your children? What did you say? What WOULD you say if you had a pen right now? Here are some of the things I’ve said to my sweet preschooler, loving toddler & amazing husband.” Do you see how that draws a reader in? Those that can relate to writing letters might be more drawn in (or those who have never considered writing letters might be curious now). Look over your page and think about how you can make things more enticing and beneficial for the reader.
• As far as how often to update it, I don’t think you need to update it all too often. Perhaps every quarter, you can replace an older post with a more recent, popular post. But take that effort of updating it every month-ish and put it into promoting this page. Make a note in your editorial calendar (if you have one) to promote the page once a month on Twitter and link it within posts without necessarily calling it out (like I just did there!).

Let me know your thoughts on the critique in the comments below. If you have an extra moment, head over to Counting My Kisses and give Amy some comment love.