Girl With A Purpose: Because Every Girl Has

Girl With A Purpose (GWAP) is a blog by Ms. Gillian Campbell, a Strategic Marketing Consultant. Though this blog is not related to marketing, she believes in empowering people to make better personal and business decisions. As their tagline goes, "This blog is dedicated to the empowerment of girls and young women."

First, I like the banner of the blog. A flower signifies beauty, and that is the most important aspect of a young lady. It's not just about the physical beauty we're talking about here. It's the inner and outer beauty of a person. I'm not sure what flower this is (you can tell me if you know!), but pink is a good choice as it has been the color mostly related to girls and women.

Second, I noticed that this blog is hosted on Typepad. It's rare to see blogs built from Typepad but the most popular blog that uses Typepad is Seth Godin's blog. So it is never really that bad to get off from the norms of choosing a most commonly used blogging platform.

Comments about the layout.

As I said, I liked the banner. But there are lots of things I want to point out about the layout of GWAP.

First, the sidebar. There is nothing wrong with having so many widgets. Even I have many widgets, but all of them - I considered important and functional. On GWAP, there's just a lot of widgets. I mean LOTS of them. Most of them, I don't see the purpose at all. Some of them have titles, but have no content. Some are third-party widgets not related to the blog. One example is the Work From Home widget, most of the jobs on there are technical jobs. The directories are not aligned properly, they are all scattered on different alignments. The sidebar is just too cluttered.

Another thing, I really don't appreciate the 'Link Within' widget being visible on the front page. It's like overviewing all the contents of the blog. It's fine to see it when you clicked the post and landed on the post page, then seeing the related posts below. But on the home page, it is indeed confusing on the reader's part.

It would also be better to make use of a jump list, or a 'Read More' link. Even I had a little head ache viewing the posts on the front page because of not just the sidebar clutter, but also the posts clutter.

I noticed that there are two 'You might like' widgets. There is also two sharing widgets, a text version and the button version of social sites. It would also look better to make use of the justification alignment on paragraphs. I honestly had a hard time reading the posts.

On to the posts.

The blog started on April 2005; that was 6 years ago! The blog mostly covers female-related issues, but there are also some topics that everyone can relate. The category tags are a bunch and it's really hard to tell which niche GWAP is really focused on. However, the top tags are the Quality of Life and Current Affairs categories. You will also read more posts related to Jamaica and the Caribbean.

I've also noticed bible verses on the posts, and on the sidebar there is the bible verse of the day widget. Could it be that the title has been derived from Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life book? I'm not sure. But I would say that this blog speaks things related to God and connects it to life.

They also post coupon codes, for the shopaholics out there. They also post some news related to technology. I can say that this blog is not just focused on one topic, because every girl has their own likes, and this blog is for every girl out there.

Visit the blog at www.girlwithapurpose.com.

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