Blog Makeover of the Week: Gigi Devine Murfitt

It’s Makeover Monday — today we’re reviewing Gigi Devine Murfitt’s blog. I’ll give some suggestions for ways Gigi can improve her blog, and then it’s up to her to either:

1. make do-it-yourself improvements
2. hire the team at Blogging Bistro to do it for her (we have talented graphic designers and developers in our stable who work wonders on Web sites and blogs)
3. do nothing. But that wouldn’t be right!

Join the fun — enter your your blog in the Monday Makeover Challenge.

Gigi writes:

This blog is my one year walk through the God Calling devotional book. I post a new devotional every day based on the theme of the devotion in God Calling which was written in 1935. I’m amazed at how relevant the devotions are today even though written 75 years ago. But that’s how God’s Word is – Alive!

Here’s a screenshot of Gigi’s blog:

General Comments

Thanks for sharing your blog with us, Gigi. I noticed that in addition to your blog, which is hosted atBlogspot.com (aka, Blogger.com), you also have a WordPress.org Website at http://www.gigimurfitt.com/, with a completely different blog at that site.

However, the blog that’s embedded in your website hasn’t been updated in nearly a year. Ouch! My first suggestion is to migrate your blogspot content over to your website, so you can manage and host both your website and your blog from one central location.

If you have built a large readership over at Blogspot (and it appears from the NetworkedBlogs and Google Friend Connect widgets in your sidebar that you are in the beginning stages of building a solid readership), you don’t have to delete your Blogspot blog. You can create brief (1-2 sentence) “teaser” posts at Blogspot that link directly to your WordPress.org blog until all your readers get used to finding you at your main website.

Blog posts

I like the way you structure your posts, starting with the Bible verse in block quotes to make it easy to spot.

Each post is personal, brief, and you often mention by name the people you are praying for. I think that must be a great encouragement to those people!

You’re also doing a bit of subtle marketing by including a link to your website at the end of each post. That’s a friendly, warm way to introduce readers to your devotional books that are for sale on your website.

It’s good to see that you’re including images in each of your posts, and you almost always put them in a consistent location. My personal preference is to align images either to the right or to the left (with text wrapping around the image), as you did in your Day 206 post. I think it creates a more cohesive feel for the post than centering the image, which leaves a big gap right in the middle of your post.

Header

Your blog’s title, Gigi Devine Murfitt, Author and Speaker, tells us at a glance what you’re all about. And your title matches your blog’s URL, gigimurfitt.blogspot.com/. When I googled your name, both your website and your blog appeared on page 1 of the results (yay!).

Your tagline (directly below your blog’s title), is too tiny for my aging eyes, and it’s quite lengthy:

Welcome to my blog of thoughts and encouragements based on the God Calling Devotional by AJ Russell.

You can get away with shortening the tagline to:

Thoughts and encouragement based on the ‘God Calling’ devotional

You might even come up with a play on words for “God Calling” and make the tagline even shorter.

One thing I’m not seeing anywhere on your blog – and it definitely needs to be front and center – is an image of the God Calling book and a link to Amazon or other online bookseller so people can purchase the book and follow along with you. (Disclosure: I embedded a link to my Amazon Associates account when I mentioned God Calling in this post.)

If you don’t already have an Amazon Associates (affiliate) account, I encourage you to sign up for one (it’s free). You will earn a small commission on every Amazon product you sell via your Associates link.

Sidebar

You are streaming your Twitter updates into your blog, but you last updated your Twitter account over a month ago.

My rule of thumb for streaming in updates from social media accounts:

If you’re gonna stream ’em, you’ve gotta update ’em. Regularly.

I like your list of Favorite Books – that helps me to instantly connect with you, and it lets me know about your reading habits.

You provide a way for visitors to subscribe to your blog, but the link is waaaay at the bottom of your Home page, where people aren’t likely to find it. I’d move the subscription form to the top of the sidebar.

Color Scheme

I love pink, and the pink tones in your professional headshot nicely match the colors on your blog. But Blogspot blogs tend to display large areas of the background color, and on my monitor, I’m seeing a good 2 ½ inches of pink background on either side of your blog. It’s a bit overwhelming.

Plus, “pink” shouts “For Women Only.” I know that’s sexist, but our society is still very pink vs. blue-oriented. If you’re content with blogging exclusively for a female audience, the pink works fine. But if your audience includes males, you might consider a variation on the pink scheme.

I like the color scheme on your website much better. It still features pink tones and is quite feminine, but the pink there is a subtle highlight, as opposed to the dominant color.

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