The design of This Full House is weak simply because the left and right sidebars are so prominent that I found it difficult to keep my focus on the actual content. The color scheme, fonts, and font size all seemed a little archaic, and the fonts were generally too large, giving the blog a poor aesthetic quality. Within a few lines of reading, I figured out that the author is a mother and wife and that most of her content is related, if sometimes loosely, to these two topics.
I think you’ll have to be a parent, or at least female, to really appreciate the authors insights and talent. The posts are well-written, but they often relate the mundane aspects of her everyday life, from her dislike of brown rice to nighttime skinny-dipping with her husband. The writing itself is clear and sometimes clever as well. It’s written in an off-the-cuff manner, as if the author is just recording a conversation with a close friend, but the content of the posts is somewhat generic, tired out. It seemed to be the same old parental blog – an outlet for expressing the frustrations and joys of modern family life. However, the author is prolific enough that the reader gets an intimately voyeuristic look into her life and the lives of those in her family.
The layout needs to be tweaked a bit to bring a hierarchy to the content. The sidebars and the main entry column are almost battling for the readers’ attention. Also, the headers above her different groups of links are ambiguous – ‘enjoyed with a strong cup of coffee…’, ‘tossed with a nice crispy salad…,’ and so on. This might just be a pet peeve of mine, but I like to know why the author includes certain links on his or her page and cute ambiguity tells me nothing. The ‘about’ page is a list of 101 things about her. I read about 50 and the items did help describe the author, but I didn’t want to have to read 101 sentences just to find out a little information about her. Another pet peeve: a long list that doesn’t tell me much about you instead of a brief ‘about’ paragraph from which I can decide whether or not we share the same interests. Save the list for a post. Also, the links to The Philosophica Mother, an outside site, didn’t work.
I think you’ll like this site if you’re a parent (the author does get a bit racy at times to spice things up) and the author is a good writer, but I felt the content to be generic and it seemed like a lot of effort went into making the blog cute rather than clever. The rating of 2.5 could get bumped up to 3.5 with a design that focuses the reader on the content better.This Full House