Eie Flud: Small Business Blog of the Day

I'm doing a bit of tweaking to my RSS reader to see if I can get it to help me find new small business blogs to review. Through the reader, I found a blog  today (thanks to a link from CT Biz Blogs) that's been around for over a year, and frankly I'm surprised I haven't heard of it before. Today's blog is yet another installment in the English chapter of Pajama Market, as many small business blogs seem to grow from that island.

What it is
Eie Flud is a soap company "...nestled away in our pretty English hamlet on the Leicestershire/Rutland border." Heather Platts owns Eie Flud and writes the blog.

Features
Where to begin? Heather is one of those people that is passionate about writing on her blog. She is more of a 'blogger with a small business' than a 'small business person who has a blog.' You can read about all the soap products Eie Flud sells, discussions on business practices, some poems, and some personal reflections.

Favorite Post
Testing & Developments mentions some struggles Heather is having with the technological side of her site.

"There are several issues I have to get to grips with:

• See I can now add bullet points!! Couldn't do that before!!!
• I wanted to be able to easily load up random images from the web - voila!!
• Next will be to work out how I can resize images so you don’t need bi-focals c/o ‘Benny Hill Specs R Us’
• Then - and this is the most important bit - how to upload, correctly sized, photographs taken with a standard camera that have been scanned on to the C Drive.
• Then, I think we might have to treat ourselves to a digital camera - we had one that was a freebie with the laptop - but its hopeless. I’m sure that a digital camera would mean a lot less fussing with scanners and such like."

Further Comments
This is a very nice blog. The format looks like an old WordPress template, which is neither slick, nor particularly attractive, but it does give the blog a sense of honesty and simplicity, pretty dead on for the type of business. Also, Heather is straightforward that she isn't the most tech-minded person in the world, and the blog matches that look, giving it a solid charm you might find missing in newer, slicker blogs.

There is a lot of attention given to navigation. You can pretty much find your way to anything you want like archives, the home page, or even the soap store, without getting lost or discovering a confusing page. I especially like that Eie Flud has done away with a traditional website and simply use the blog as the main site, even as a store front.

The only thing that threw me on the site is the very first post. It's a welcome post, but it contains the date, "January 1st, 2006." For a few seconds, I thought I was on a dead blog. I would eliminate the date on this post if possible.

Tags: eie flud, eie flud soap, eie flud soaps, heather platts, leciestershire, rutland england, england