My chosen blog to review on is Mikeala’s blog (http://mikaelaswrld.com/). Side note to everyone, I’m not sure if there is a new link that I should be looking at because there is no change at all on the site. Feel free to let me know about that as well! I will be talking about the design, the accessibilities of the site and recommendations I would like to give her so she can improve her site.
The site is currently using the template it has been given by WordPress, so I will be judging based on that. I really like the monochromic colour scheme you decide to keep for your site. With addition to the whitespace you have and clear hierarchy for each display components (header, sub header, and body copy), it makes the site looks very clean and easy to read through each portion. Now, let’s move into the accessibilities portion of the review.
The first point I would like to talk about is the navigation portion of the site. There is no tabs to help me lead to other pages on the site. I kind of have to “look around” to find the information I am looking for. In relation to that comment, the vocabulary used for the navigation is not helping me find what I’m trying to look for. So, my recommendation for this part is think about the accessibility and how should the readers look through her blog. To make it easier, think like this:
- What makes a site, any site and it doesn’t have to be a blog if you don’t read one often like me, easy to navigate and why is it working?
- How can I implement that to my own site?
Secondly, after clicking to “Hello World” sub header on the landing page, it leads to another page that I assume it is for all the posts. The keyword here is “assume”. The readers should not be assuming where the information they are looking for is. She, as the blogger, needs to provide a pathway for me, the reader, to where I want to go. So, my suggestion if it is a little bit hard to think about that. Write down a flow. Break it down, step by step on how do you go from the landing page of the site to the section you want to find.
The last point I would like to bring up in this review is to start publishing her posts. Like the teaching team has been saying, there is no solid deadline (except this review) for the posts, but it would be good to look through your process on how she gets here and starts creating a conversation with your audience. Right now, since there is nothing yet, I don’t know who she is. As Cory Doctorow (2021) mentioned in his “The Memex Method” blog, the blog is the publisher’s branding on a platform. In this case, her WordPress is her branding. She can start “digital gardening”, a term used by Tanya Basu (2020) in her “Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet” blog, where she shows her growing process as a blogger on something she is learning or getting challenged on.
I have touched based on the big improvements you could do on your site. To recap, I suggest her to work on the accessibility portion of your site for the menu and pages’ names first. I would also recommend her to start post her process and assignments on the site. As for the designs, that can come later. Thank you Mikeala for letting me looking through your site and I am excited to see how your site looks like in the future!
Want to read more about what Doctorow (2021) and Basu (2020) said? Here are the links:
