Web Design For Idiots

I really like your color scheme. Browns are my favorite combination and it looks REALLY good if you do it right. You did it right. You have a good combination of dark and light browns but did not overwhelm me with the dark color. Your font seems abnormally large. Can you change the size of your font to just a tad smaller? Large fonts make a website look cluttered.

I think that your tag line is a tad long. It reads:
“THE place to go for practical parenting tips and ideas, get answers to your parenting questions, or just have fun. **For specific suggestions regarding your child, or any other questions you may have, please contact Mom at aandsparenting@gmail.com**”

Remove the part about specific suggestions part. People are NOT going to decide to send you an email regarding their personal issues with their children right away. The information that you put in your header always should be content that you want people to know about your website right away. Take, for instance, this website. I did put that you can contact me for web design help in my header. I assume that if people like my writing, that they will see my contact page and realized that they CAN email me if they want help. I suggest that you do the same.

You should create a little graphic to put in your sidebar, or at the very top of your blog. I would push the Entre Card box down and put a “contact me” 125px x 125px graphic there. Something like “Your child care questions answered” But you can come up with your own too.

Also, don’t you feel that you Giveaways are more important than your entre card graphic? I do. I think that giveaways are what makes people bookmark and continue to come back to websites. People do not want to somehow miss out on something free. Even if they are not guaranteed to get it, they want a chance. Make another graphic, even if it’s just some fancy text, that says GIVEAWAYS!!!! and link that to your post about the giveaways.

Now you have the “How did I find you” section and THEN you ask “How did you find US?” It’s a tad bulky in the wording. What I would do is just keep a headline that says “How did you find us?” OR if youre really set on “How did I find you?” you can use that too. Theres nothing overly wrong with it. HOWEVER, all that text underneath is unnecessary. Just create a text link that says TELL US HERE and if they want to tell you, they will click on it if they WANT to tell you about how they landed there. The thing is, that sentence underneath is useless because people know what you are asking by the header, and it is taking up valuable sidebar space. Its a great addition, but you can make it more streamlined.

Now, under that you have “become a sponsor” which can stay, but you should create a small link underneath which will bring people to a page where you explain what being a sponsor entails, where the money goes to and so on. But its good to have in your sidebar because it will always be there and when someone reads a post and they say “Hey, she really knows what she’s talking about, and she’s going it for free!” They might decide to toss some money your way, but they want to know what it goes towards. Be as upfront as possible. That is something that I was thinking of adding to my blog as well.

Now you have an INSANELY long list of “sites to see” I do not know if you can create “pages” in a free blogger blog, but if you can, create a page called “sites to see” and leave your top 5 favorite sites in that list and then a little link that says “…more” that brings them to a page of many more sites. You can then sell the top 5 site spots at a fee to those blog owners, if they are interested.

For you, I would also make a CATEGORIES list to put at the VERY top of your sidebar. People might want to see your best craft projects, but not want to read about your recent time management fiasco. Categories are the BEST way to keep readers because your front page only has a few posts, and is not in any way a complete guide to what your content really is, and visitors are lazy. When they get on a site, if they don’t see exactly what they want within 2 clicks, they will leave. Categories will show a complete list of every topic that your blog covers. Again, i’m not familiar with the free blogger program, but I think you can add categories.

Once you have categories, you will have little need for archives, so you can choose to keep it or loose it.

The bottom of your blog is large, spacious, and haphazard. I LOVE the about me, but i am contemplating putting it right on the top. People like to see who the reader is, but its SOO big that it would push your posts down. MAYBE if you had the categories, it would not be so bad, of if you cut the paragraph down a sentences.. I don’t want to tell you to do it because I do not know how it would look, but it might just be some food for thought.

Why do you have the text GOOGLE ANALYTICS there? Remove it. It’s not doing you any good there right? Unless for some bizarre reason it NEEDS to be there, but I can not think of one.

Then, just see if you can put the “total blog directory” “Rate my blog” and the visitor count all on the same line. Instead of one on top of another making the blog even longer than it is.

Overall, you did a fantastic job a not killing your readers with ads and shiny graphics and such, but i feel that you are TOO bare!! You need to start adding graphics to posts. Graphics are eye catching and what make people click on things! Just look at the front of my page here!! Its loaded. You can check out deviantart.com for a bunch of free graphics that you can use in your blog. I love that site!!

So thats it. I hope that you can use most of my comments. The only other suggestion is add an actual contact page instead of just an email address if you can. All of this is tentative because you have the free blogger account and you do not have complete control. Do what you can to make it as user-friendly as possible.

I hope that this helps you, and if you need any help in making these changes, feel free to contact me. Its what i do.

Maybe you can take some of the donations you get and put it towards a hosted blog that you can completely customize on your own!

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Want to know who is offering this awesome content? Here it is! Someone who is relatively new to web design. I am new enough to still remember how absolutely frustrating it was to try and get anything done in this field, but have also been around long enough to be able to help those that are where I was a year ago. Aside from web design, I run the office of my dad's engineering business, and do book keeping by trade. I love my pets.. All 6 cats, 1 peg legged dogs, and 1 hedgehog. LOVE THEM!! Oh yea, and my husband. He lets me chase my dreams and I let him do the same. We are happy people because of it. Read more from this author

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Website Feedback. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.