Fitness Blog Review – The Naked Dish

Hey everyone this is an exciting post because we get to keep rolling with the real world examples.  Sirena Bernal of The Naked Dish Blog volunteered her Wordpress fitness and nutrition blog for a design review.  Why is this good for you?

You get to see what areas could need improving and which are good.  You might be doing something that you think is totally rad, yet design wise it doesn’t make any sense.

Sort of like these guys.

So that is why its good to not only have an external pair of eyes look at your fitness site for your own benefit, but when its posted here, everyone gets a chance to find tips and useful bits of info.  Everyone is hear to help each other right?

Trust me I’ve seen some pretty crazy stuff on websites: salespages with links to affiliate products that make $4.93 commission instead of selling training for $157 per month.  So lets look at some design enhancements that you might be able to use on your fitness website as well.

This post is going to be different than the last review series – Urban Burn Bootcamp Website Review.  Instead of spreading out the review over a week and four posts, this review was cut in half and will be posted as two videos in this post.  Enjoy.

Part 1 goes over the following issues on Sirena’s Naked Dish blog:

• This blog has a nice color scheme and very calming colors which is discussed right in the beginning.
• RSS feeds still aren’t really popular so you really need to generate curiosity and get someone to click on it.
• How you can draw attention to your sidebars by giving the headlines a nice background color.  This allows users to to see where different sections of your sidebar start and stop.
• Use the more tag in your blogging efforts to increase page views and comments.  Find out why – Using the more tag on your fitness blog
• If you make it hard to comment, then you’re not going to get any comments.  Make sure your next desired step is clearly doable by your reader.  On this review you see the comment section is really tough to get to.
• Tweetmeme and share this buttons can cause a lot of clutter.  Again make sure you don’t have too much stuff for your people to do.  You’ll see multiple Tweet this buttons right next to each other here.

Part 2 goes into some more tips for your fitness blogs:

• The tag cloud is one of the weirdest things I see on blogs.  It is automatically turned on when you get Wordpress but is really unnecessary and makes things look really ugly.  Don’t have tags after your posts or in your sidebar.
• If you are writing posts that have parts, make sure to link to them in each post.  Also you can use a plugin like Organize Series to make the navigation to those series easy for your readers.  You’ll see the one we use on this page at the bottom.
• If you’re giving away a free report or fitness tips ebook, please give it a good image.  Those flat images are a thing of the past.  If you have photoshop a quick google search for action scripts will get you everything you need.
• If you have social media icons linking back to your Facebook fan page, then make it prominent.  Sure you want them there for your blog, but Facebook might be a better, more personal place to be with your reader.  You can see that Sirena’s icons are really small.
• Make things clear. You can see on this blog that there is the consultation section which the picture of a phone.  That doesn’t tell me anything as a consumer.  Write phone consultation or whatever is going to happen when they click.

I should turn these tips into another top website tips post like this one – 13 Fitness Website Design Tips Anyways what did you think of this review? Are you doing any of the mentioned improvements?