Eleena’s Eleena’s Thoughts is the blog I am revisiting for this peer review, and one that has had some significant renovations since I’ve last posted about it. It is described as a “document” of the writer’s “journey to improve [their] mental and physical health in the new year”, and as such has the intended audience of similarly minded young people – particularly women – on health journeys. As Michael Warner suggests in his article “Publics and Counterpublics”, the public for this blog, or the audience of readership it pulls, would be defined by a simultaneous interpersonal and personal experience with the blog. Indeed, the solitary experience of viewing the blog in one’s own time in conjunction with the shared experience with Eleena herself, who places her person at the centre of her blog content by nature of it being a Personal Blog, makes Eleena’s Thoughts a page that generates a specific or intended public through its content but also through the nature of a website.
As such, it is pertinent to understand how this blog accommodates this public, and what marketing techniques it employs to help generate interest from its intended audience. One thing that Eleena does well in terms of marketability to her intended public is the balance of formal and content-based elements on her home page. By this, I mean having things like her pinterest linked at the bottom of the page allows for visitors to glimpse an immediate image of her interests and vibes, specifically in a way that is cultivated by herself. Additionally, I think posts like “3 Things I’m Doing to Start 2023 Right” aligns very well with her about page, which states her intention of being a self-care and growth-focused blog.
Tanya Basu posits in her article “Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet” that digital gardens are websites on the internet that “are more collage-like and artsy”, and “explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning”. This, to me, perfectly describes Eleena’s blog, a place focused on self improvement, growth and learning, with a collage-like homepage, splicing together recent posts, images and social media pages like Pinterest. All of these elements make for a page that caters to Eleena’s intended public of people looking to work on their self-improvement, and, perhaps a little meta-contextually, one that’s growth echoes and reflects Eleena’s own betterment journey. A garden, after all, relies on an abundance of growth.