Bloggeries is going to look at another personal blog pertaining to health, wealth, and happiness. The blog is called Katalina Mau. The blogger blogs about a little bit of everything, including a love for real food, real adventure, and real live. The blogger believes we are all entitled to create our own health, wealth, and happiness and blogs about ways that we can achieve this. Get a feel for this blogger’s philosophies by checking out any of their most recent bloggeries: Inspiration; You Can Quit Smoking, without pills, potions, or patches!; Which Wolf are You Feeding?; Changing Again; The One Heck of a Giveaway Contest, Blog Review – NorthxEast.com A Blog About Blogging; Need to Lose Fat? Cut Out Artificial and Processed Sugar; and 23 Ways to stay Healthy Year Round.
Bloggeries are in black text on a white background and there is a black bordering around the blog. Bloggeries are centralized and there is both a left and right navigation bar, as well as a navigation system in the footer. In the left navigation bar you will find featured sites and advertising, Recent Posts Menu, Categories Menu, Archives Menu, and more advertising. In the right navigation bar you will find Subscription information, ads, Link List, News from the Blogosphere, and AdSense. The Footer contains a Recent Comments Menu, Archives Menu, and an About Us page. The categories for this blog include Everything else, Happiness, Quotes, Health, Wealth, Business, and Websites and Blogs. Most bloggeries are accompanied by a relevant picture as well which adds some meaning to the blog.
I will go with a 3.3 for this blog for now. Right now I think the blog’s overall appearance is affecting the blog score the most. I would suggest changing the colors and formatting of the borders containing the navigation systems. With the black borders, the ads stand out far too much, they literally jump off the page and this is can be distracting from the blog content. I also think there is too much space in the navigation bars. Perhaps moving the navigation bar content into one comprehensive bar would fill up some of this empty space more. Another suggestion for this is to move the content from the footer into the left or right navigation bar. I think the material in the footer is good blog material, and it may go unnoticed by being left in the footer. The blog scores well for content. This is clearly more of a personal blog than anything, and I think the voice of the blogger is credible and has the potential to connect with its readership. Another idea is to have a search for the content inside the blog; at the moment the search is a google search and searches the web instead of the blog. I would increase activity a bit, or at least give it some consistency. Right now the blog is being updated anywhere from a day to a week in between bloggeries and it would probably get more traffic by regular updating. Overall, this is a great concept for the blog, and it is written well. With a few changes, the blog’s readership will be able to gain more from this content without focusing too much on the appearance issues.
-Chrissie