WRIT6001 ASSESSMENT II—GROUP EDITORIAL ANALYSIS
LADY LASH! AUSTRALIA
Lady Lash! Australia is a company located across the Sydney and Central Coast Region that
provides eyebrow styling, eyelash extensions, and lifts. Their main focus is on eyelash
extensions as proven by their Instagram profile and website. We will be conducting an editorial
analysis on these platforms as they are their main social media presence and there is a difference
between the two.
We have chosen to analyse the written content, the photographs, and formatting of the
sites; this includes the content choices of the photographs, and the captions included on their
Instagram. As a well-known and respected brand, it is important to bring that professionalism
into their social media presence.
Written Content & Formatting
The home page of a website is the most important aspect of a brand as it is meant to
communicate the most important information, as well as the brand’s visuals and aesthetic. The
Lady Lash website has a white, pink, and deep grey colouring, it’s light, feminine, and
appealing to the eye, though I found that the white font was a strain to read when put against
the pink background, as in the header.
The first thing potential customers will see is a ‘sticky’ menu with numerous options,
a large transitioning banner, and a short introduction. The sticky menu can be bothersome as it
closes off the page’s space, isolating the format into individual blocks that fill the screen and
make readers scroll more.
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The issue is with the introduction as it not only has repetition and errors (highlighted)
as a result of poor copywriting and proofreading, but it only details the business’s locations:
Proximity is a vital factor in a business’s success, however, customers want to know
why they should choose the services Lady Lash offers over another business. This dry and
unprofessional introduction does the business a disservice as the assumed priority of the
customer is time and distance, not quality of service.
Following the introduction is this blogroll:
As informative as these pieces may be, they take up space on the homepage and are not
contributing to the overall brand image. In addition to this, if a customer wants to read a blog
post, there is a convenient ‘blog’ option in the menu. The ‘Welcome to Lady Lash!’ finally
comes after the blogroll, at the bottom of the homepage.
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Despite the marked grammatical error, the first line immediately attracts customers as
it mentions that their employees are award winners in their field. This section is attractive and
informative and should be the first thing customers see. Great improvements can be made to
the homepage by removing the transitioning banner and blogroll for clarity and space, and by
combining the ‘introduction’ and ‘welcome’ paragraphs.
At the end of the homepage, Lady Lash shows a banner of their recent Instagram posts.
For the purpose of this assessment, an analysis will be made about their most commented and
most liked Instagram posts.
Lady Lash’s most commented post in the last month features a professionally
photographed beauty product and, because it differs from Lady Lash’s usual pink and white
aesthetic, is more eye-catching. This post is incentivised and, therefore, more likely to get
attention from customers.
An unattractive element is the hashtags that are filling the caption and are drawing
attention away from the prize details due to their volume and colour. I would suggest that Lady
Lash list the hashtags in the comments, which can be deleted later for clarity, as it will still
draw algorithmic attention, but wouldn’t distract from the prize information.
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The most liked photo in the last month on Lady Lash’s Instagram features a more candid
image of a client with a short caption that references their ‘hybrid lash’ service. Unlike their
most commented photo, there are less hashtags with the image being the main priority here. A
strong suggestion to consider is that Lady Lash could elaborate on their hybrid lash service in
this post; the post is a recent upload, meaning it is one of the first few posts clients gather
information from.
Inconsistency of Instagram
While Lady Lash runs a successful Instagram profile, they don’t appear to have an organised
method of posting. Their posts appear to be random, and their captions are inconsistent as they
vary length or include typos. It appears as though the captions are written by different people.
Ideally, the company should have one social media manager to run the Instagram
account, so that everything is consistent. Additionally, an upload schedule would optimise their
viewership as posts receive varied number of Likes, approximately 30 to 160 (occasionally
posts will reach over 250). There are many applications that can be used to show which
hashtags and upload times optimise viewership.
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Drop Down Menus on Website FAQ
The Lady Lash website was recently updated, and while this did remove initial walls of text
from the viewers, these massive amounts of text have been moved to dropdown FAQ menus.
While this is a solution to the initial problem, it has not been perfectly executed. An example
from the Full Set Eyelash Extension page is included here:
There are ten questions included here. This list can be narrowed down to six, making
the page less cramped. There’s repetition in Q1 and Q3 – they are essentially the same question.
I think that Q2 and Q5 could be combined, as could Q6 and Q7, and Q8 and Q9. Each lash
style has a correlating page, but they feature a lot of the same FAQs.
To minimise the clutter, the general lash related questions should be filed under the
Classic/Hybrid/Volume Lash pages. Then, questions related to specific styles can be filed
under the correlating pages. This saves space and avoids repetition.
Inconsistency on Different Screens
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There is slight inconsistency we noticed on each of our laptops. The website displays itself
differently for each of us, despite all using Google Chrome. While this may be a coding
problem, it is an inconsistency nonetheless.
Further, their website URL (www.sydneyeyelashextensions.com) is different to the
company name (Lady Lash! Australia), which can cause confusion for potential clients. With
these little inconsistencies polished, the website could reflect the professionalism of the
business itself.
Photographs & Aesthetic
Racism and Audience
Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems on both the website and the Instagram is the
marketing, which is distinctly not inclusive. The problem with this, aside from being
unrealistic, is that it will ultimately affect the business. Lack of inclusion can be a deal breaker
for potential clients.
On the website, Lady Lash displays Before/After photos for their different lash sets. In
these photos, there’s one set of hazel eyes, one set of light brown, and six sets of blue. Dark
brown and green eyes are not featured here. On the display pages for different lash categories,
there are four sets of blue eyes, two light brown, one green, and one dark brown. Furthermore,
in all of these cases, the faces are light skinned.
Scrolling through the Instagram will show mostly white faces, an occasional light
skinned Asian, and some who look vaguely Mediterranean. There are no dark-skinned people
featured on either the website or the Instagram. This is simply not acceptable.
While this may reflect their actual clientele, it still lacks inclusivity, and will ultimately
affect potential clients from reaching the business. On a smaller note, the Instagram features
occasional memes that reference relationships, which are always heteronormative. This is
another instance of lacking inclusion in their marketing.
Design Formatting on Website
The information displayed in each website to their target audience is significant, crucial, and
critical for every company. As well as the choice of colour palette and typography. However,
usually web designers forget to combine all these elements in a way that it is appealing to the
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human brain ending in some kind of design that at first view is comfortably accepted - but after
merging yourself in it, the sense of disorientation and mislaid kicks off. This usually happens
when the web designer focuses on simple facts (e.g. colours and text) that the company desires,
incorporating the visual material provided to them without a sense of sensitivity in how to mix
them. Designing is like cooking, you cannot mix just the ingredients expecting it to be a five
star dish without the touch.
As previously mentioned, Lady Lash! Australia’s website was recently updated,
making it more minimalistic with flat patterns, grid layouts and with a more limited
monochromatic colour palette where pink, white and grey are now their basic colours.
Although it was a profound change of improvement on their website, there are still a few flaws;
for example, having their logo in a light pink colour over a white background (or vice versa)
making it hard for the eye to focus or presenting the essential information in a monotone format
(refer to Image #1). Their online professionalism would increase if they just could focus more
on details like those.
Image #1
In brief words, a recommendation to improve their online page would be to incorporate
the usage of bullet lists where the price of each service comes along with the name of it;
followed by a short product description as well (look for image #2). Removal of the white text
over the light pink background colour and apply more large background images or videos (refer
to image #3) would increase their website attractiveness.
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Image #2
Image #3
Inconsistency of Photo Quality on Website & Instagram
Along Lady Lash! Australia’s Instagram account and website, an inconsistency in their photo
quality arises. A client can find, on both online platforms, professional photos with professional
models but also low-quality photos with strange photo angles (refer to image #4), generating
an unpleasant feeling while looking at them making it hard to concentrate in their product—
eyelash extensions.
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The need to show their product on regular customers is understandable, making it
acceptable to use phone photos (not HD quality), nevertheless these images should be separated
in another section, for example: Take a look on how you could look! (Before and after photos).
The idea of incorporating video proof of how each set of eyelash extension looks like is
amazing, however the low quality in a few of them brings down the company’s professionalism
(image #5).
Image #4
Image #5
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Conclusion
Through this analysis, it was found that Lady Lash! Australia’s website and Instagram account
are missing some design guidelines regarding not just photographs or image composition, but
also well-planned information architecture on how to present the data in a pleasant, attractive
way.
As mentioned before, as a well-known and respected brand, it is important to bring
professionalism to every area of it, especially their social media presence. Lady Lash! Australia
have not reached their full potential and are, in the ways explained above, alienating the needs
of their customers and disregarding their duty as service providers to focus on creating an
image-based brand. Branding, especially visual, is a component of business establishment, not
the core.
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ASSESSMENT REPORT
Member Names:
Contribution:
• XXXX: pages 1 – 4
• XXXX: pages 4 - 6
• XXXX: pages 6 – 9
o Introduction and Conclusion completed together.
Group reflection:
Getting work done is hard, and getting work done in teams is usually harder, however we found
that we were very easily able to coordinate ourselves and evenly distribute the workload. We
agree that our group should get 85 and that every member is deserving of the same mark as we
divided the workload equally while also working with each person’s strengths. Additionally,
we were easily able to set up a meeting time to coordinate the assignment, and we each met the
personal deadline we agreed on at this meeting.
Individual Reflection:
I generally detest working in groups because, most of the time, people don’t pull their weight.
But I did enjoy working with XXXX and XXX as we managed to organise ourselves and
complete each of our designated sections on time and to an excellent standard. I believe our
work was thorough and covered every prominent aspect of Lady Lash! Australia’s Instagram
and website. Overall, I think our group did a great job despite being in different locations and
conducting majority of our work online, I would definitely work with them in future.