Mommas Review: Retail Minded Blog

March 4th, 2009 • Web 2.0, reviews

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Written on Mommas Review:

First, let me tell you what makes me oh-so qualified to review this site. You see, I’m a boutique owner, but more than that, I’m a web designer and coder as well as a writer.

The Blog by Retail Minded was inspired to support small retail business owners and the wholesalers that sell to them. By offering valuable and educational blogs, The Blog by Retail Minded can help increase business productivity within many sectors of retail, including marketing, publicity, merchandising, packaging, and more.

The information on this site is clear, concise, and well written. The site has a distinct, easily recognizable purpose to educate business owners that is reinforced throughout the site. Nicole, the author, really knows what she’s talking about.

Nicole writes to her audience. She does not talk over them or talk down to them. She uses their jargon and includes a page for Retail Terminology so the lingo doesn’t get overwhelming.

From the SAHM crafter to the boutique owner, this site has great advice for anyone looking to sell products online and off. I learn something new from every post, and have increased my profits already.

My favorite post is #1 Thing To Do To Compete Against Big Box Retailers. It is obvious that her ideas and methods work when her advice is to be personable and make customer service your priority.

Nicole responds to comments quickly and thoroughly. The content on the site is updated regularly and there’s even an rss feed. Unfortunately, the site isn’t very printer friendly (without all the navigation bars, advertisements, etc) and the articles aren’t available in pdf format.The site also isn’t available in multiple languages, though google can auto translate things per user.

It is very visually appealing and hard to get lost. The site has a consistent feel and appearance, minimal scrolling, and great colors. The Blog by Retail Minded loads fast because it is mostly text driven, ie has few images. Besides having a consistent feel throughout the blog site, that feel and image is consistent with the image and feel presented through the rest of the company’s site.

The Blog by Retail Minded is easy to navigate with descriptive category and subcategory headers. It was slightly aggravating that there’s only one article per page and you have to either click on a recent post in the sidebar or next page at the bottom of the website. I’d like to see a list all titles of articles in one page. Actually, I want to see that implemented on all self hosted wordpress based systems.

I cross compared this on various browsers, and the design has no browser specific problems. Kudos to the designer. A note though, you do still need meta tags, even if they are obsolete. If someone googled ‘Retail Minded Blog’, they’d have no idea what the site is from the description.

This site leaves you wanting to come back again!

Note: Since posting this over at momma’s review, Nicole implemented most of my suggestions!

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