Mami Bizi – The Story of My Life. That’s the tagline that greeted me upon checking MamiBizi blog for this review. The tagline is clearly written on a striking orange header, just next to an illustration of a lady baking some cookies.

The owner used a template style named Dilectio Blogger by DesignDisease. The blog layout is a 3-columned with two sidebars on the right and a left content. On the middle there are a search form, labels, a shoutbox, an archive of old posts, recent comments, top commentators, nuffnang ads, links to favorite blogs and referrer lists. On the right sidebar, you can find a raya card, follower widget, twitter updates and some banners.

The layout being used is yummy orange for the background and black text on white for the content. Choosing to use black text on white is really a great point in blogging. It’s easy to the eyes or in other word, reader friendly.

Content wise, the owner seems to update her blog regularly and that is another good point in blogging. The owner writes mostly about her baby, family, baking and anything that relates to her life. Some blog posts are accompanied by relevant pictures which is another good point for a blog.

I’m giving this blog 3 star rating out of 5. This blog gets above average for navigation and activity, while content, uniqueness and appearance scores an average.

1. Content  0.6
2. Uniqueness 0.6
3. Activity 0.8
4. Appearance 0.6
5. Navigation 0.8

Here’s a suggestion of things that I think the ownner could do.

• The existing header is pretty but the color made the header not outstanding compared to the background. Because the background color and the header color is the same tint of color – orange. Perhaps, the owner could consider changing the header color to a lighter color because the picture and tagline also looks kind of overshadowed by the header color. The idea here is to make the header more appealing at the first sight.
• In addition to the header color, it’s advised to make the header size smaller for faster loading. Especially the header’s height. Well, I know most of us are so tempting to use a big header because it can fit so many things or pictures. But, it’s not a good idea if you’re facing with slow loading pages.
• The owner also could change the font color of the navigation bar above the order (for cakes/cupcakes ordering). The current one is easily missed because the font colors are not really in contrast with the background.
• To improve the content and uniqueness, the owner could consider adding more useful contents beside family stories and baking order updates. She could do more writing on subjects that she knows and would be useful for readers of her blog. Perhaps, some tips on baking better and tastier cakes would attract more people with the same interest to visit the blog.

You see, if you want to increase readership of your blog, posting tips or tutorials on subject that you have passion in could help stir interest. After all, blogging is all about sharing. The more you’re willing to share, the more people will look at you as a source of reference. If someone really love your tips, they would share with friends and others.The power of word-of-mouth (spreading of a good thing among others) is how the big successful web like Yahoo become what they’re right now.

Give people something, and they’ll give something back to you.

Oh.. I have a bonus tips for Ann. She asked how to make a blog page loading faster.

Well, there are many things that you could do. Slow loading page can be due to many obvious reasons.

1. Header – small header load much faster than big header (small refer to the height – eg I use 170 pixel height for MBP’s header while MamiBizi’s blog use 300 pixel).
2. Widget with Flash – animated flash widget is well known to reduce the loading performance of a web page (eg label cloud, ‘bagi ikan makan’ and ‘yang husin suka’, ‘berapa ramai masuk arini’ and Blog Upp widgets on MamiBizi – all using Flash)
3. Friends Updates – friends update with snippets of recent post and icons are taking lot of spaces thus slowing page loading. It’s advisable to untick the options and change to show only the title of recent post and date (eg. under ‘yang ku suka’ on MamiBizi’s blog).

That’s all my review on MamiBizi! What do you think about this blog? Leave constructive comments here for Ann.

And, to Ann, keep up all the good work and happy blogging!

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