This is the final draft of the blog Microbes et al..
This blog is directed to the educated general public and wide science community. To advance from the first draft to this final draft I interviewed three individuals that might read my blog, as suggested by the course instructors. Basically, these are examples of my target audience:
– Maria Manuel Rola: graphic designer concerned with environmental sustainability and human impacts in the ecosystems. Maria represents the most layperson from my target audience. She was the one that suggested me to create a new section (Glossary) that provides accepted definitions for the jargon and technical words used in the posts.
– Renato Soeiro: PhD student in Mathematics with a general interest in biological sciences and human impacts in the environment. Renato represents the wide scientific community with which I want to share the knowledge and ideas from the microbial ecology field.
– Catarina Magalhaes, PhD: Catarina Magalhaes is a Post-doc researcher and expert in microbial ecology and nitrogen cycling from University of Porto, Portugal. Catarina represents a target audience that is automatically interested in the blog due to her field of expertise.
The three “personas” gave very positive and constructive feedbacks on the blog. It was very interesting to notice that the “Postcards from the field” and “Postcards from the lab” were very satisfactory to all members of the target audience. Lesson learned: Using pictures is absolutely helpful to “attract” the audience.
Obviously, the two people that are not experts from my field, Maria and Renato, had trouble understanding some of the words used. For that reason, I created the Glossary page and I plan to write more simply from now on. I plan to post to the blog 3 times per month. This frequency might be challenging but since I have different contents to publish I think it’s realistic.
Below are some screenshots of the later version of the blog.
Let me know if you want access to the blog to check out the following contents already added:
- About Microbes et al page
- About Miguel’s current research page
- Glossary page
- post in “News from Miguel’s research”
- post in “Postcards from the lab”
- post in “Postcards from the field