Larabar: Small Business Blog of the Day

Today's blog was suggested in person, for a change, rather than from an email, a comment, or through an internet search. I was speaking with my best friend last night when he mentioned that his wife was a big fan of a particular food bar brand. She said it had a blog so I checked it out...

What it is
The Larabar blog represents the Humm Foods company, makers of the Larabar and the Mayabar. The company is owned by Lara Merriken in Denver, Colorado.

Features
"Fan of the Day" posts highlight people who eat the product with some tongue-in-cheek writing. Other posts mention what the owner is up to, where the product is launching, and some fun contests for visitors.

Favorite Post
Contents May Shrink After Washing is one of several posts highlighting people who eat Larabars or work at Humm Foods.

"That's right: Shawn is a giant! How else to explain that ill fitting shirt he's wearing?"

Further Comments
What I love about the blog is that whoever is writing it seems to "get it." There are several pictures, nearly one for every post. Many of the posts focus on the company's customers in the form of the "Fan of the Day." The posts are very focused on the company, not too self-serving, and the writing is interesting, if a little cheesy from time to time. Also, this is a very new blog (March 7), so the expectation would be it will only get better and better as time passes.

The format of the blog is a bit problematic, however. This begins with the Larabar website itself which is heavily Flash-centric. The link to the blog is easy enough to find, but when clicked, a new window pops open for the blog and it can't be resized, nor are the standard 'back,' 'forward,' 'home,' etc. buttons available like they are in a normal browser window. This is a highly annoying characteristic for me because it means you can't easily go back or forward or copy and paste the URL of the page. (Note: if you click on the link I created earlier in this post, it does not create this problem as I have extracted the URL of the blog from one of the permalinks and created a link like normal.)

Once you're on the blog, there is no obvious link to get back to the Larabar website. 'Home' brings you to the Larabar Blog's home, not Larabar's home. Even the blog roll fails to include Larabar as a link. This is not a big deal from the perspective of a website designer who created the blog as a separate pop-up page that leaves Larabar.com open in the background. But the nature of blogs dictates that the majority of folks who read a post will see it from a direct link from another website, or in their RSS reader. It would be nice to have a link to Larabar.com right on the blog in case the visitor did not discover the blog through the home page, and many won't (like all the readers of this post, for example).

Clicking on the 'author profile' brings you to an email form. I would expect an author bio here, not the form that is typically related to a 'contact us' link.

Finally, the archives are represented by a calendar with bold dates representing days that posts were written. I much prefer the format that allows you to click on posts one month at a time. This gives you an immediate look at how old the blog is and lets you quickly navigate through all the posts. The calendar leaves you wondering if there are posts in November even if you don't see any for December. You're never really sure.

On the other hand, what I really like is that at the bottom of the page you can simply click on the 'Next' link to go to the next oldest set of posts. Most blogs don't have this intuitive navigation, so this does make the blog easy to navigate in that respect.

Now, I feel like I've totally railed on this site and I want to make it clear that I like it. I think the blog is doing a lot of things right and the problems I'm complaining about are very easily fixed. To sum up, here's a checklist:

1. Change the link on the Larabar.com page so that the blog opens in a normal browser window.
2. Add a link to Larabar.com on the blog, preferably at the top of the navigation bar.
3. Change the 'author profile' link so that it links to a bio of the writer of the blog.
4. Add an archived-by-month list similar to the one on Pajama Market and most other blogs. It's an automatic option with Typepad and I would think an option with nearly all blogging formats.

Tags: larabar, lara bar, lara merriken, denver, food bar, health bar, health food bar, natural food bar