Parent & Child Magazine Website Review

As the father of a 3-year-old and someone whose family has grappled with the complexities of raising a child in the 21st century while managing careers, I chose to review Parent & Child magazine's website.

This is my—and Pace's—first entry in a series of digital magazine reviews of top ABC magazines and Adweek Hot List magazines. We want to review some great digital magazines and learn from the best in our sister industry, in terms of content, design and editorial management.

I loved the content of Parent & Child magazine, but the site design, SEO issues and lack of committed social media engagement meant I gave the site 25 out of 50 points. As part of my review, I contacted Parent & Child and asked the editors for their opinion of the site, and asked a few questions about editorial management.

I learned that the site is going through a facelift, to be launched later this summer, so the editors declined to comment on the current version. I look forward to the re-launch, and if we have time to put the new site in Pace's series, I will include a review later this summer with interviews.

On to my review:

Strength of Content: 8
The magazine content is designed for moms of children from birth to 12 years old. Yet in many circumstances the content spoke to parents, rather than merely focusing on mothers, a refreshing change for this dad.
In the top four features highlighted, I read an interview with the authors of a book about shared parenting, an article on the importance of reading, info on Michelle Obama's new Let's Move campaign and a kids' recipe guide for international foods.

I thought the site was really feature rich. However, I saw little interaction with the community of readers or with influencers in the parenting social media community. Which leads me to ...

Social Media Sophistication: 4
Parent Boards -
The community board is dead. Many of the postings are from 2007, and the latest posting is from September 2009. I think if anyone looked at the listing, they would immediately discount the freshness of the community and choose not to visit the community again. One way to encourage people to come back to a website is to give them access to the readers' community. To build a successful community, you have to energize the community. I suspect there may be no more management of the community forum other than content moderation.

Parent & Child Blogs -
The site has four columnist author blogs: Grade School Mom by Kathleen Chambard, Toddler Mom by Amy Borrell, Grandmom by Adele Brodkin and Children's Librarian by Els Kushner. All of the blogs except for Kathleen's Grade School Mom had entries last published in 2009.

While I did see references to other bloggers in the wider parenting blog community, I did not see many, and I also did not see much comment activity. I suspect the bloggers were not given enough time to conduct an outreach strategy to other bloggers in the wider community. I've been a blogger since 2003, and running a successful blog is not just about writing content, but also engaging the wider community.

I also discovered the site had a Parents blog that featured the content from all four bloggers. I noticed that the blog featured the latest post from Els Kushner, but that post was not in Els' Children's Librarian blog.

Ease of Use and Navigation: 4
The magazine content appeared to be almost an afterthought. The main navigation for Parent & Child magazine initially did not appear to feature any of the Parent & Child content. I did find reference to the magazine content in the second item under Parents. All of the other links led to additional magazines or other Scholastic content.

For a searcher just exploring the Scholastic site, I think including the magazine content in the navigation, the way the site currently does, works. But for anyone attempting to search for magazine content, I think the navigation could be difficult to use because it is serving so many purposes.

Most of the print magazine content was listed on the right side of the home page for Parent & Child magazine, further down the page, and labeled as being in the print issue.

Design and Layout: 4
The site was clearly designed for multiple purposes, and as a result I think not much time was spent considering the particular needs of magazine readers who are looking for a digital version of the print magazine. For example, it would have been helpful to see the description of the purpose of the magazine above the fold, both for the reader and no doubt for search engine robots spidering the site. The higher the content, the greater the relevancy to search results.

I also think the site could do more to design for search engine optimization issues, from optimizing headlines from the print version of the articles to rewriting URLs to include targeted keywords.

No pictures were used in the individual magazine articles; I think there was a lost opportunity to repurpose some of the images from the magazine. And the site probably lost some opportunities with optimization of images for search with not using ALT tags. That's an important factor in search.

The portion of the site in the second navigation lists a number of different sections: School & Learning, Books & Reading, Activities, and Family Life. Each section had at least four sub-tabs-preschool, grades K-2, grades 3-5 and grades 6-8, although Activities had a section for all grades, and Family Life was split into different subtopics. On the Family Life part of the magazine site, it would have been helpful to have a similar navigational aid as the other sections have with their sub-topic tabs. However, once I navigated into this section of the site, I really enjoyed the richness of the content and how easy it was to navigate; the tabs helped me find content based on a child's steps through life and school.

Use of Technology: 5
My earlier identification of the problem with the blogging content, where the content displayed in one part of the site was not found in another, was an issue for me. I really look at the timing of content. If a site's content is not fresh, unless the site provides really good legacy content, I'm unlikely to return.

The staleness of the forum was also a problem. The site obviously had a good technology platform (Lithium is one of the leaders in social media community technology), but it has not invested in community resources to engage readers.

I liked the Scholastic Word Wizard powered by Wordsmyth, a tool that enables you to understand the meaning of words on the site. But the widget did not significantly add to the content or usability of the site, so I would rather have seen the site designers put their technology efforts elsewhere.

The search function was OK. When I conducted a search on the word parent I received a lot of listings for products and thousands of articles. However, it would have been great to have an advanced feature to segment the articles by date or other factors.

 

Parent & Child Magazine Review Summary

I was glad to hear that the site is going through a re-launch, and I'm looking forward to the summer. Parent & Child has high-quality content, especially when I found the second navigation where there were steps and plans for taking a child from preschool to 12 years old. Parent & Child's online magazine is a great resource for the browser, or for the searcher who finds the website through Google or social networking.

Posted By: John Cass