Peer Review 3: Let’s Talk About The Tea!

WOW! is what I will describe Hilda’s exciting news-filled and gossip worthy site! I had the pleasure of reviewing her eye-catching site that definitely attracts her audience to browse through it. Talk About The Tea (T.A.T.T) is the perfect site to get up to date on the hottest news! This review’s focus will be about her website’s marketability and her intended audience group.

Audience

Through her “Can you sit with us?” post, I gained a deeper understanding of her blog design and intended audience. Even before I read her post, I could tell whom her target audience is, since she brilliantly created the site design to attract older teens and adults as readers. She describes her site as a saucy, hot new website that is TMZ’s younger sibling that loves the hottest news. The majority of her audience should be 16+ years old, since some of the posts contain explicit language. She sets to have adults as her main target audience and created the blog design in mind of her audience by using a gender-neutral template. I noticed she updated her site’s colour palette from blue to red from a peer’s previous review to fit the fiery theme of her site. Her blog is upfront and in your face in a good way. She produced an excellent site that will gain audience’s participation in an online community.

In Tara Chittenden’s article, she talks about how “participation in virtual communities and social network sites is now firmly embedded in the culture of young people growing up as ‘digital natives’ and that these mediated interactions are reshaping processes of self-expression, identity-building and sociality”. This holds true to how our audience is formed. The interaction between the blog and followers facilitates an exchange that will continue growing as the blog and content succeeds in drawing the readers in. This relates to what our guest lecturer, Monique discussed about in class about audiences. We need to learn how to make people stick around to read the blog and create content that will draw our intended audience. We need to think about the audience, and their context and what suits them. I think Hilda does a great job of this! The captivating headlines and interesting content attracts the viewers to continue browsing the site. Other key parts include bringing awareness and engagement to the site, which will be discussed further in the next section of this post.

Marketability

I think her site would be the perfect place for advertisements, so I suggest adding Google AdSense to her blog! As her blog is for news and gossip, I think all kinds of advertisements would be suitable. I did notice that the mobile version of her site has ads, but her web version does not have any. I am not sure why this is, so maybe she can check up on this issue. I really like her moving flash story headline feature because it makes it look like an authentic hottest news site! Her blog captions and headlines also stands out! It really grips her audience to click onto the posts. Her use of sip sip 🙂 at the end of each post gives a personal touch as well.  I love how she incorporates music videos for her songs of the week. It creates a fun element to her overall theme. I also can’t wait to see her T.A.T.T. podcast that is coming up. It will be exciting to hear what hot topics she will talk about. Having all these features bring awareness and great engagement to her website!

Furthermore, having social media connected to a site can definitely attract more viewers to visit her blog because she can link her site on those platforms. I like how she has Twitter and Instagram logos embed links on her page, but I do suggest maybe having it at the top of the page instead because it can get lost in the sea of articles on her website. I see that she recently added the Instagram account and I hope to see more posts on it because it will be useful in bringing attention to her site. I also suggest that for the embed links on her posts, she should either use a different colour or bold the font because it is difficult to see that it is a link to another source.

Overall, I had a great time reading Hilda’s blog and would definitely continue checking it out to catch up on the latest news and gossip! 🙂