This review of Hormones-Beauty-Health is brought to you by The Weblog Review blog and website reviews. Get your site reviewed within 4 days by using the 'For Faster Service' link on the left menu.
Hormones-Beauty-Health
My first thoughts on viewing Hormones-Beauty-Health was that a) it was not a blog and b) it wanted to sell me something. I guessed it wanted to sell me one of many things sold via the internet that most people would never set out intending to buy, which makes a website necessary to advertise, sell, and cleverly cross-reference the product with other sites. My first impression turned out to be too cynical and flighty with its love of flitting from first glance to conclusion. Hormones-Beauty-Health does have a blog and it wants to sell you something, but the site offers a lot of free information, recipes, and tips.
The main site design, riddled with Yahoo ads as well as links to what appears to be every page on the site, tastes a tad like spam. The pictures and text seem like they were dashed down quickly, to get the site up as fast as possible, though the pink and white colors are nice. Getting to the blog requires some link-hunting (hint: instead of scrolling down the page, just search out “blog” in the menu at the top). It’s a Wordpress blog and is much more attractive than its companion site, mostly due to the aesthetics of the Wordpress template, the customized banner balancing lily with beautiful woman, and the backgrounds in subtle shades of linen.
Here, all the ads are confined to the sidebar. Surprisingly, there is an assortment of goodies in the blogroll, including the artsy boygirlparty.livejournal.com and refreshing creative writing on bluishorange.com. I found a few new favorites in the blogroll, though its contents were strangely juxtaposed to the content of this particular blog. It piqued my curiosity about the blogger, but unfortunately, the “About” section only displayed the default Wordpress message. Some of the blogs listed were weirdly popular and/or mainstream, such as the Blog of a Bookslut and Cute Overload, not to mention Google’s Blog. My cynicism began fluttering again, as I wondered if linking to an assortment of popular, though unrelated blogs was a marketing strategy to increase traffic to Hormones-Beauty-Health. I liked many of the blogs listed, but in a specialized blog like this, it would be more beneficial both for the blog and the reader if the blogroll contained more relevant sites.
The blog posts contained a luscious assortment of homemade recipes for all-natural beauty regiments as well as vegetarian dishes. They offer a lot of health tips, tricks, and information, many of which I’d never heard before and might try in the future. The tip about brushing cornstarch into oily hair made me cringe, but my hair is unreasonably oily, and I’ll try anything, especially if it is as innocuous and inexpensive as cornstarch.
A lot of people will find this blog useful and surprising. If you are health-conscious, vegan, and care about your appearance, this blog consistently offers sweet soy tidbits for your taste buds. Naturally, if you like their free advice, they hope you’ll buy some of their products, so they regularly plug posts with offers from their sponsor, an independent consultant for Arbonne International, a line of beauty products. There are plenty of archives to research, which is always a plus. The first entry, made in December of 2005, is titled “Introduction” and with some punching up, could be the “About” section this blog needs. It starts off, “This Blog is designed to keep you informed on Women’s Health and Beauty Issues.” Nice.
I wish there was a category for “Health” or “Product,” because “Personal” doesn’t seem to fit. Though it’s a few sizes too big, it’s the only one that comes close to fitting, so there it is.
This site was reviewed on 2007-06-30 by Djuna.
They felt this site belonged in the Personal category.
Djuna felt that Hormones-Beauty-Health deserved a rating of 3.25.
I changed the category for Hormones-Beauty-Health to Business. This is a marketing site run by an affiliate for a company (http://www.ihdistribution.com), and in their own words they are "a progressive distributor of women's healthcare and beauty products."
Progressive? Like Moveon.org? Progressive like Liberals leaving the democratic party because it is too conservative? Good gracious I hate the overuse of the word "progressive" all across the globe these days. I'm not sure what makes them "progressive." They certainly aren't "radical" or "revolutionary." At least they don't come across to me in any way that could match up with a definition of progressiveness.
Anyway -- the Hormones-Beauty-Health website is filled with feature articles on Women's Health Care, from Skin care (adult acne, aging, post-menopausal problems) to general health care (stress, eating disorders, post-partum depression)and Emu Oil.... which I believe is something they really are into at Hormones-Beauty-Health.
The site is a gentle pinkish brown and white with standard blue underlined links in the Arial font. It is very easy to navigate, very light on graphics, and truly an "informational" site with dozens of articles on all kinds of health, hormonal and beauty topics.
In their top bar navigation (which is dark pink text on light pink background, slightly hard to read on my flat-screen monitor so i had to punch up the contrast a bit) there is a blog category so I went there to see what was being blogged.
It is a Wordpress driven blog, header banner with standard two column layout. The colors of the banner are completely different than that of the marketing site. I would suggest html code of "target=blank" off of the Hormones-Beauty-Health page to launch people out of the marketing site and open up a new window for a page so completely different in scope than the rest of the site.
This page is located at http://www.hormones-beauty-health.com/wordpress/ for those following along at home. It is an easy to read and navigate blog, with somewhat repetitive information from the Hormones-Beauty-Health main page. There is an entry examining other blogs and their popularity, links to a favorite blog or two, some free recipes from a "sponsor" (which strangely enough links back to a sub-page in Hormones-Beauty-Health).
The "about" page inside the blog still holds the original Wordpress content for 'this is your about page, you can write here about yourself.' I highly suggest that be edited because it looks silly to leave that with the default content.
The blog site is very simple and easy to navigate. The header banner is much nicer than the header for the marketing site at Hormones-Beauty-Health.
Blog archives go back to December 2005 but there is mostly one blog entry for the each of the first several months of the blog's existence. It seems that the blog is now being used more often to promote the main corporate site as the recent months have a lot more content. The earlier months' content seems to be repeated in some way on the Tips page for the main marketing site of Hormones-Beauty-Health and so I'm wondering -- why blog at all if everything is over on the marketing site?
Everything seems cyclical and points back to the main page eventually. I think this is all a big online marketing site for people to get some advice on psoriasis or other skin and aging issues so they can buy ... Arbonne! There are links to the skin care company Arbonne within blog entries as another "sponsor" to ihd.myarbonne.com. We know from the beginning About page in the main site that IHD is the progressive affiliate for another company, obviously Arbonne International.
Everyone I know right now is selling Arbonne. They want me to host parties and will give me 300 dollars off or free shipping to everyone who orders from my party... all my friends are trying to climb an inner corporate ladder to become regional sales manager or district sales director for Arbonne.
None of them have a webpage.
Overall, the tips and advice are interesting. Everyone is trying to make money on the internet, and Arbonne is a growing business. Our blog author is using the web to promote his/her business and hopefully drum up some sales. I wish him/her the best of luck.
I have no real intention of revisiting the blog, but the Hormones-Beauty-Health page did have some good content that I may refer back to. I give the site a 2.75 rating.
This site was reviewed on 2007-06-30 by amusings.
They felt this site belonged in the Business category.
amusings felt that Hormones-Beauty-Health deserved a rating of 2.75.
2 reviewers gave Hormones-Beauty-Health an average rating of 3.0000
Site Stats
Site Category: Personal
Reader Rating: 0.0000 based on votes
Report URL
Cast your vote
Sorry you need to log in to vote.