Blog Analysis

April Annette May

Blogs I choose

• Feministing and Jezebel • Both of my blogs are feminist blogs.

Feministing focuses on social and political issues facing women. Jezebel focuses more on women in pop culture. Both promote gender equality.

• http://feministing.com• http://jezebel.com

Strengths

• Both blogs have simple layouts that are easy to navigate.• Both blogs keep posts to a paragraph on the homepage and

have a “Read more” button so readers can finish it. This keeps the homepage less text-heavy.

• Both blogs include a photo or photos for each post. These photos are click-able and expand when you click them.

• In Feministing’s posts there are several links within the texts for the reader to learn more.

• Jezebel has a vibrant and attention-grabbing header. • Jezebel uses very few ads and they do not distract from the

posts.

Examples of strengthsThe icons over the name catch your eye. Most of the text is black so the vibrant red stands out.

The purple highlighted words in the text are clickable and will take the reader to a past blog post about the highlighted words. That way the reader can learn more about the issue in an easy way.

Weaknesses

• The most obvious weakness is Feministing’s several ads. They have an ad directly below their headline and some in-between the blog posts. The ads are brightly colored and distract from the posts.

• Another weakness with Feministing is their introduction paragraphs to the posts are too long. Jezebel uses shorter intros and it looks cleaner.

• Feministing can also work on being more consistent. Some of their posts are much smaller than other and some do not have pictures. When they do have pictures the pictures are sometimes different sizes and on different sides of the text.

Examples of weaknesses

Directly to the right of Feministing’s icon is an ad.

This is another example of their overuse of ads. Also, it shows the awkwardness of the post. This post has several different topics. Some of their posts have one topic and are much longer. They should work on consistent sizes of posts.

Opportunities

• Both blogs can work on including more videos.• Here is an example of one of the videos Jezebel posted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaULrJHdMdY • Feministing can work shorting their posts on their

homepage. Their posts are too long and photos are too big. The reader has the opportunity to click on the “Read more” link so there is no need to post so much info on the homepage.

Threats

• There are many feminist blogs online. These are some of the most popular ones:

• Feministe: http://www.feministe.us/blog/ Feministe uses nice colors to highlight the articles. The colors, text and font are consistent. The ads are far to the right and are not distracting.

• Bitch Magazine’s blog: http://bitchmagazine.org/blogs This blog uses large photos to grad the attention of the reader. There are zero ads. The black text on a white background is clean.

• Salon’s blog: http://www.salon.com/topic/broadsheet/ All the articles on their homepage have a consistent format. The text is black against white and looks very clean. There are too many ads, including on underneath the header.