A Review of Bloggin’ Mama

Posted by Mrs. Mecomber

April 18, 2008

I’m taking a little break from blogging about business performance management software and am finally back in the blog review business! I have a little list of blog reviews to do, and now that I am on Wordpress and everything is settled, I can comfortable blog away!

Bloggin’ Mama is a “frugal” blog. These have become very popular recently. I must say that I do like them much better than the typical mommy blogs. Mommy blogs are nice, but… I tire of looking at baby pictures day after day, lol! Bloggin’ Mama is all about what’s hot on the ‘Net– saving money!

The template is very nice and simple. It’s a basic, general free template, but it suits the blog content very well. The buttons and banners are minimal, and even the AdSense ads (a bane of mine) are not very distracting. The Bloggin’ Mama has done a good job with keeping the reams of content well organized. I loved the sidebar categories section, and the well-titled links. Everything is very easy to look over.

The posts are filled with tips and techniques for the typical frugal mother. Some posts have cute photos of the baby, and they lend interest. The RSS feed button, so necessary these days, is large and obvious in the header.

My first suggestion would be to tweak the header a little. It’s rather dull, and the brown color is dingy. I would stick with the streamlined look– nothing fancy at all. Maybe just the blog title with fancy letters? No flowers, no baby bottles, God-forbid, no bills with Ben Franklin on them (HOW many blogs have that, now?!).

Also, every individual post has a list of AdSense ads before the comment section. I guess it’s OK, but… it lessens that personal touch and feels intrusive. I personally don’t like AdSense and I surely don’t like AdSense within the content of a post! It looks awful. But that’s my personal preference. Finally, the buttons could be organized a little better. There are big ones, little ones, long ones, narrow ones all over the place. I prefer the buttons to give a flowing feel. Cluster them in order of size, or in order of category (linky buttons here, pay to blog buttons there).

Over all, Bloggin’ Mama looks like a great blog. A few tweaks and it could be even better!