Blog Page Critique: Lost and Forgotten

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: Lost and Forgotten

Blogger: Marta

Page: About Page

Marta blogs about life in general: family, work, money, trying to exercise more and so on. With her About page, she hopes to give people a glimpse of my family and who she is and who her family is. She wants to make sure she gives readers enough information to entice them to read and know more.

Visual:

• From a design standpoint, the first image of cool, blue water is a welcoming one. It’s a great picture of you!
• I like the fact you used large pictures to break up the page so it’s not a wall of text. Your kids are cute! If you could, try to get a picture of your dog that’s the same size as the others so they are uniform. Also having a black border around the other pictures would look make them more uniform too.
• For the What About Me? heading, I feel like there’s a lot of space between that heading and the line below. You may have to go into your theme to reduce that space in your CSS file. If not, perhaps change the title to one that’s a little longer so that area doesn’t look as empty.

Navigation:

• While you already have an About page link in your navigation menu, consider a small blurb about you in your sidebar and include a link that goes to your page. The link could suggest to the reader to read more about you and your family. Having a face on the homepage of a personal blog helps build a connection faster since a reader can attach a face to the words you write.
• One thing your About page needs is links to blog posts of yours! It helps get people deeper into your site. For example, if you wrote about Chicago, then link that word to a certain post.
• Consider turning off comments on your pages. A page has a longer life span than a blog post; plus it’s a page you should continue to update. It may look dated to have comments from years ago being shown. Plus, people sometimes do weird things like ask you a question or leave a spammy comment (“follow me and I’ll follow you back!”) and you don’t want everyone visiting that page to see that.

Content:

• I like that you kept things short and sweet. However, one thing I noticed is that I don’t see your name anywhere on that page. Is that intentional or just an oversight? Even if you don’t prefer to use your real name, consider giving yourself a pseudonym or nickname. Attaching a name to you helps readers form a connection.
• The paragraph towards at the end where you say you’re just a mother struggling with getting older, missing Chicago, etc. gives readers an extra peek into your life and your blog. However, I think it might have more impact at the top of your blog because everyone might not scroll down that far.
• While I think the short descriptions about your kids are just fine (and fun to read), you’re the star of your own blog. I think readers can form a better connection with you if you share more about yourself and your blog (even more than the previously mentioned paragraph). What’s your blog about? What will readers find on your blog? Convince the reader that it’s the place for them. What will they get out of reading your blog- fun stories, inspiration, entertainment? Make sure they know what to expect (even if it’s “you never know what to expect here”)
• Instead of using a link to Twitter, consider adding a Twitter button so people can follow you right from your About page! You can find the button on Twitter’s website.

Let me know your thoughts on the critique in the comments below. If you have an extra moment, head over to Lost and Forgotten and give Marta some comment love.