Tantrums to Smiles is a blog written by Jess, who shares child-friendly ideas for products and days out, along with sweetly personal tales of family life.
First Impressions
Our first impressions of Tantrums to Smiles is that you have an attractive and welcoming blog design, with a fun, bright header.
We do think your blog could do with a refresh, so that it provides an even better showcase for your great photography and writing style. Have you considered moving your blog to the self-hosted WordPress platform?
Apart from opening up your scope for working with advertisers, it offers much more flexibility in terms of blog design. You can pick a WordPress theme (try Theme Forest or Elegant Themes for ideas) and these tend to be more modern and professional looking than the ones on Blogger. Plus, many of them are free! If you have a little money set aside, you could invest in a blog designer to help give your blog a slicker look and feel.
Top tip: You might want to think about rebranding now that your kids are a bit older (Evelyn is surely not out of the tantrums stage yet, but the day is approaching). Even something simple like adding the tagline: “A UK Family Lifestyle and Review Blog” in the header, so that your blog title stays relevant as your kids and audience grow.
Header and Menu Bar
We like your colourful and playful header. It instantly draws you in and sets an expectation for your content. Our first suggestion would be to reorganise your categories, so that your blog is easier to navigate.
Since you have been blogging for a fair few years, it would be ideal to separate your content into sub-categories, as Day Trips and Reviews is a bit vague. You could break Reviews down into categories like Toys, Arts & Crafts, Days Out and then file the reviews in relevant categories.
Top tip: If you don’t want to stretch your header bar too thin, you could list these categories under the ‘parent directory’ of Reviews — like this gorgeous blog: abeautifulmess.com/
Main Content
We love your warm writing style and want to keep reading. Being young-er parents you bring a different perspective to the topic of parenting, without age being the sole focus. Your emotional connection with your audience is good; we like how you walk the line between reflection and engagement really well.
In terms of look and feel, we would suggest making your post headings bigger and making sure they have a uniform style (i.e. either capitalise every word, or only capitalise the first word, but make sure it’s the same each time). For your headings, bright green isn’t the best font colour – it stands out but it isn’t pleasing to the eye. How about something like dark peach or pink or maybe even a darker olive green?
Another idea is to use excerpts, so that you don’t display your entire blog posts on the homepage. An attractive image with a post title and a snippet of the content should give your blog a more polished look —- and possibly increase page views!
Top Tip: Cut back on exclamation points! From a professional writing standpoint, these should be used sparingly. When writing numbers under 10, these should be spelled out (one, two, three… instead of 1, 2, 3 etc). Also always read your writing aloud, and then double check your spelling, before hitting publish to avoid typos. Perhaps you could install some free spelling and grammar checking software, such as grammarly.com?
For more pro tips, check out former journalist Jacqui’s post on five common writing mistakes: mummyslittlemonkey.com/2016/09/writing-tips.html
Photographs
Your pictures are great – big, bold and bright! And how cute are your kids?! Just take extra care to make sure your product shots are totally in focus (you might be holding the camera a touch too close). For a more streamlined look, you should try to keep the width standard across all photos.
Top Tip: Have you thought about putting a photo of yourself in the side column of your home page? That way people can see you at first glance, and will have that instant connection with you. You could write a synopsis bio underneath it, then link the photo to click through to your longer ‘About Me’ page.
Sidebar
Your sidebar is rather busy at first glance. We do like the bold social icons, but wondered if there’s a way you could make them look more streamlined. Perhaps place them in rows, rather than in one long column? Your social following is impressive: why not showcase those numbers alongside the icons, to attract more interest from potential brands/advertisers?
Are you aware that your Google+ icon is returning a 404 page? Also you seem to have multiple G+ follow widgets. Perhaps it’s time for a quick sidebar declutter to figure out what’s really useful? For instance, Blog Archives are no longer necessary on your home page. Make your search bar more prominent and that is really all you need.
Top Tip: Think about setting up a dedicated email subscription service (Mail Chimp is great and free up to 2k followers), along with a prominent sign-up form on your home page, to encourage more subscribers. Feedburner is fine but a little outdated!
About page
We enjoyed reading about you and your family on the About page. Again, do watch out for the odd typo/punctuation error, as the About page is typically the second most clicked on page after your Home page.
Top Tip: It would be wonderful to have a bigger and clearer photograph of yourself front and centre on this page, to match your sweet pictures of the kids.
Final Thoughts
Thanks for sharing Tantrums to Smiles with us, it’s a delightful blog packed with helpful and well-written reviews. We hope you find our tips useful and look forward to seeing your blog evolve with style!
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