Blog Page Critique: Chasing Motherhood

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: Chasing Motherhood

Blogger: Christina

Page: About page

For Christina, Chasing Motherhood is a place of refuge and inspiration.  She shares tips or tidbits that help her find balance and appreciate the amazing gift of family. The blog is an opportunity to share thoughts, ideas, or products which she finds helpful and hopefully so might someone else.

The About Me page is where people are interested in the blog can learn a little bit more about Christina, her journey, why she started the blog, and what they might find as a reader. She wonders if she has too much backstory, or if it’s confusing talking about her previous allergy blog, Our Ducks in a Row.

Visual:

• From a design standpoint, hooray for having a picture at the top of your page! Having a blue border around it is a nice, simple touch as well.
• One thing that really stood out was the entire text looking like it’s bolded. Reading text that’s all bold, uses a fancy font or something else that’s different from the norm can strain the eyes and make your words harder to read. Consider using a font that isn’t so thick (or unbold the font if it’s bolded). This will also give you the opportunity to use bolding for emphasis in your blog posts and on this page too!
• Consider using thumbnail images that highlight your popular or favorite posts. Or even just another picture on your page. Photos help draw readers down your page since they give something for the eyes to land on.

Navigation:

• You have a link to your About page from your sidebar which is great! It also shows up on the other pages too.
• While you have navigation links on your page, none of them link to your content. They either link to another site, your old blog or your home page. Remember that an About page should give readers a peek into what your blog is about. Even though your popular posts are on the sidebar, people are reading through your page so have some links there too (whether or not they are the most popular or not). These will drive someone further into your blog.
• Consider ending with links to your social media profiles. It’s a good way to make it easy for someone to follow you rather than having to find all those links.

Content:

• Okay, let’s talk content. Your first paragraph sets the stage with a general intro about you and your family.
• The next few paragraphs are about your previous blog. While I can appreciate your story, think about the purpose of this page: for visitors to get to know you and your current blog better. Consider restructuring your content so you talk about you and what your blog is about, THEN go into your background. Journalists write in inverted pyramid style. The most pressing and relevant information goes first then the less relevant or background info goes after. If the newspaper (back in the print days) runs out of space, it’s easy to chop off the end of the article that way. Plus, people often don’t read all the way through. While you don’t have a space contraint, you do have to be as relevant as possible in the beginning of your page. See how it works when you rework it.
• Consider breaking up the page into sections. For example, the background of your blog history could be a section called something like “How I Got Into Blogging.”
• I noticed you say “the reader.” Consider changing that to “you.” Someone reading it is most likely your reader and it adds a more personal touch.
• You write a good bit about your past blog so consider balancing this page with more about you and your blog. As I mentioned before, link to some of your best posts in there as well.

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