Kristi Hines said
6 months, 2 weeks ago: Thanks @therealsupermum for submitting your blog http://www.therealsupermumblog.com/ for review on SME. I hope you find my various notes helpful!
Design Notes
Love the cartoon work you did with your banner! This is just the opinion of a minimalist, so don’t be offended, but I think having a simpler, solid background would be a little less distracting.
It looks like there might be something going wrong with the template or a plugin, because the bylines of your posts (at the time I was viewing your site) said: NOVEMBER 7, 2012 BY THE REAL SUPERMUM” REL=”AUTHOR”> THE REAL SUPERMUM. It’s like the HTML code is just a bit messed up.
In the sidebar, I understand wanting to warn minors about the content being potentially unsuitable, but when I first read that, I thought there might be something more along the lines of a R rated movie. I figure you are probably referring to some of the topics, but maybe there is a better way to say it such as “This site contains content for mature audiences relating to mental health, sexuality, and topics not suitable for minors.” Although, to be honest, when I was a teenager having my own battles with depression, I would have loved to find a site like this and would have hated to be turned away from it.
I noticed a login section – is there any way to add some details as to why you need to login – is it for the forums, to post comments, etc.?
Also, could you move up the search box in the sidebar? That way people coming to your site can find it quickly when they are looking for something.
Social Notes
I see that you have links to your social profiles in the sidebar and sharing buttons in the posts which is great! See if you can configure the Twitter button to include your Twitter handle with your tweets – it should allow you to append via @TheRealSupermum to them.
I also noticed that the Facebook comment app has a little warning message: “Warning: this comments plugin is operating in compatibility mode, but has no posts yet. Consider specifying an explicit ‘href’ as suggested in the comments plugin documentation to take advantage of all plugin features.” If it’s a plugin, that might be something to investigate.
SEO Notes
Since you’re using a Genesis framework theme, be sure to take advantage of the SEO fields for your main homepage and posts, especially the SEO title and Meta Description which is a summary of your site / posts in 165 characters or less. These both show up in search results.
Content Notes
Watch out about duplicate content. I was looking at your latest post on The Snowman, and it looks like this post has been repeated on several sites by the same guy. Even if it’s for a giveaway, I make guest authors / businesses vary the content so it is not word for word on other sites. You can see the other sites by doing a search for the first sentence under Duncan says.
Notes from the Audience
Now I invite everyone here on the SME forums to add your suggestions (or feel free to agree / disagree with mine). Please add constructive feedback and suggestions. This series is to help people improve their blogs, not to have their blogs roasted Comedy Central style.
