Glassy Baby: Small Business Blog of the Day

After my long hiatus, I returned to my email today to look back and see what's in the mail bag. Glassy Baby asked me to take a look at their site some weeks ago, but their posts were a little thin, so I waited till they had a little more substance to write about. In the meantime, Typepad honored them with a "Featured Blog" mention on July 14. Just goes to show that Typepad will feature anyone. ;p

What it is
Glassy Baby is the blog for the candleholder company of the same name. Specifically, Glassy Baby's product is a variety of glass cups to place candles into, creating a unique glowing effect with the glass. Nicola is the writer for the blog based in Seattle.

Features
Stories about customers who have purchased Glassy Babies as well as product announcements.

Favorite Post
In Enchanting Events, one of the customers rented 43 of the candle holders to use during his proposal to his girlfriend.

"Nic's plan was for Anna to come to his house to find 43 glowing glassybaby, an oil painting made by Nic himself, and everything surrounded by white lilly's as he asked for her hand in marriage."

Further Comments
The writing is great and the design is very attractive. However, there are a couple of major issues that should be improved to make this blog fall into "blogging standards" where the casual reader will not be annoyed with the format.

1. There is only one story at a time on the home page of the blog. This is very annoying as it is normal to be able to scroll through at least the previous 5-10 stories that have been written. Navigating to anything beyond the first story is very tedious.
2. The archives should be set up on a monthly basis, not weekly. Since there aren't many posts on this blog, it would be much more convenient to the reader to see everything written in July at once. If there were 30+ posts in a month, then it might be broken down by week, but a monthly option is the norm.

Other than that, the blog needs more posts! There were only 4 posts for July and there really needs to be about two per week. (Of course, we should talk! We pretty much took July off!) Readers need a reason to come back to your site, and it's not because of the design or the same old stories. I would recommend any business blog to have at least two posts per week. Also, Nicola should add product pictures. The products are truly enchanting, and although there is a photo gallery linked from the blog, the blog itself would benefit greatly from photos as well.

The stories are very well written and compelling, and I find myself totally wanting more!

One more minor change to suggest...make the photo of the 36 Babies in the upper right of the blog a link to the actual products in the store. I clicked on it three times because I thought sure it would bring me to some additional pictures. Making this super-easy to get to your store will only increase sales.

Tags: glassy baby, glassybaby.com, glassybaby, nicola

Comments

[Gabe Rodriguez]

My wife (and all her friends) seem to love the Glassy baby. Thanks for linking to their blog and commenting on it as well.