1. Explain why you chose the blog topic.
There were a few reasons we chose cooking as blog topic. First of all, we all agreed that we needed to write something which we were familiar with. After talking with each other, we found we all like cooking, but we were not really good at cooking. Therefore, creating a blog about cooking could keep a record of our cooking history.
After being a blogger, we started to search other blogs to find information about food. We also considered the reasons why other blogs were more attractive than ours. That helped us optimize our blog and make us be better blogger. Second, because cooking is a broad topic, we could write our blog without many difficulties. We have meals every day; we have many opportunities to get some sources for our blog. For example, one of us go to restaurant today, we can take pictures of the food and update our blog with writing about the feeling of that meal. Or one of us cooked something at home; she can update the blog immediately. If we choose a narrow topic, we may not have so many sources to finish our blog.
2. What were the largest challenges with a team assignment?
As a team consisting of three people, we faced a lot of challenges. Lacking of corporation could be one of the largest challenges. We made a schedule of updating our blog three or four times a week in order to keep our blog fresh. However, if one of us forgot to update the blog, another member had to write something instead of that one.
What’s more, we would write something familiar with each other sometimes. But we want to make our blog diversified and write many different things. Therefore, we needed to communicate with each other as much as possible. It was quite hard to keep in contact with other members all the time. Tracy and Jamie went travelling for a few days on Christmas holiday and Yevi went out of Sydney on Christmas holiday too. All of us were busy and could not update the blog for a few couple days.
Another main challenge was different people had different ways to finish the job; we had conflicts of blog’s layout and background. It took so much time for us to decide the blog’s looking. We wasted a lot of time on these problems. Actually, we had tried our best to avoid conflicts and learned to listen to other members. At last, we got final decision which made all of three were satisfactory. Thirdly, it was not easy to improve a team blog’s quality.
3. How did you come up with the final design that you used?
The topic of the blog is cooking and our objective is to share the cooking methods and present special dishes in different countries. When people browsing our blog, they may engender interest in cooking or desire to try them, and then make progress in cooking with us. Therefore, in order to achieve this objective, the main page of our blog has several changing pictures about dishes; they look very delicate and excite praxis.
Every blog we post is talking about cooking method; we write down ingredients and every step, to make it clearly, sometimes we attach photos. If we taste special and delicious food outside, we will take photos and post in our blog as well. Visitors also can write down their comments and share the opinions with us.
The posts range from cold dishes to general meal to dessert which covers a good variety commonly seen in Asian food. We also add gadgets such as videos and link sites to broad horizons.
4. Compare a blog that has similar content to yourself, critically analyse your site comparing theirs.
The one blog we find of good merits whose topic is similar to us is linked on our website----http://www.eatlivetravelwrite.com/.
This blog is appealing to us as it is fairly eye-catching when we just had a glimpse of it. It is created by an Australian girl who teaches French in Canada now. She’s been living and working in England, Hong Kong and France. It is worth noticing that she originally started this blog as something to do in the year between MA and PhD – after all, she uses eating, cooking, taking pictures and writing as the topic. We really agree on this concept of life.
Firstly, the blog has a simple template with a unique header and straight into the content which is attractive at first glance. Our blog adopts the opposite concept of filled-colour from top to the end which may get visitors out of focus.
Secondly, the main content of the posts are strictly related to the topic, plus detailed information and feelings were shown with some humour comments every now and then. The blogger shared photos so delicate and refined that are close to professional works. Merely browsing the pictures can be a feast for the eye. I must say that she has a wonderful camera with high pixels that can shoot from the very best angle and dimension.
Thirdly, there’re many link sites provided to each post and visitors can find buttons to directly share on social networking hot spots such as Facebook, twitter, MySpace etc. which is an economical and fast way to promote the blog.
Additionally, the blogger said she spend a lot of minutes a day doing something for herself (aka. For the blog) and being creative has been the best refuge from the sometimes stressful life like a teacher/ grad student. So we can conclude she is really committed to the blog who devoted time and efforts, hence updates frequently.
If we want to create a successful blog like hers, those aspects stated above are of basic concerns. But anyway, we really enjoyed visiting her blog for delight.
