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Last week I received an email from Sandeep which read,

My name is Sandeep Gulati. I am the founder of an Hiraj.com-First Online baby diary (http://www.hiraj.com). Can you please review this site in your blog.

Hiraj is a detailed online baby journal and diary for parents. It allows parents to record wonderful memories of their child’s days and share those moments with friends and family from around the world.

Hiraj helps you to keep track of your child’s early days, everyday growth and milestones achieved based on sharing with contacts from around the world and letting them updated of all the day to day landmarks.

This is something I always wanted to do (review sites). I liked what Sandeep asked because he wanted to write my thoughts directly on my blog. I hadn’t heard of hiraj.com before, I don’t know Sandeep personally. He has no idea of what my thoughts would be – good or bad. I guess he has put the onus on me to review his site as much as possible.

Before I write my first review on my blog I would like to state that I personally am far from being perfect. I am aware of bugs/problems/undocumented-features on the portals I manage. I do my best to keep working with my able team to keep improving.

• Overall site design is clean. The logo can be made much smaller and the space on the left can be better utilized (possibly for monetization).
• Registration: Fairly simple and clean page.
  Suggestion: It would be better to have a drop down of countries to avoid people entering junk. And if you have a drop down let “India” be the first option in the drop down because you expect most users to be from India.
• Confirmation email is not sent to activate your account.
  Suggestion: Bad. This is a must else you will attract many spammers who could start uploading objectionable images. Technically this is very easy to implement.
• Soon after registration you are taken to the “Setup Process” page which essentially allows you to enter the details of your kids. You can enter the name, sex, date of birth of the child. You can enter even a future date for the DOB (fix it asap).
  Suggestion: Capture the place+country of birth, time (be sensitive about capturing timezones) of birth. 

  The phrase “Hiraj Title” is confusing, the end user may not understand what is about. The site has help in few places, would be useful to add help for this field also.

  Capture the height, weight, color of eyes, birth marks etc.

• Updating the child’s record is not straight forward. You have to click on “Settings”, then click on your child’s name, this page still shows the buddies list. Once the user says show me details of my child, show just the child’s info. Nothing more. On the left panel have a link to each of your siblings (grouped together) and buddies.
• Every child has a “About” page. I am having difficulty in reaching this page. Not sure why. Anyway this page had two interesting links – Day in History and Birthdays powered by Wiki. These two links basically show what were the important events that took place on the birthday of your kid and who are the “other” famous people who share the same birthday (after all isn’t your child the most famous one?)
• Growth: You can record the height and weight on a monthly basis.
  Suggestion: I don’t know if the backend reminds you to update it, if not it should sent out an email which says something like 

  “CHILD_NAME must be 3 months old now! Time has come to record the height and weight of CHILD_NAME”

  If possible send a sms also. You can enter the weight in pounds/ounces and height in inches. Few may want to enter in kgs and cms. Give an option for the user to choose from. Have convertion tools to convert these numbers (from kgs to ounces and vice versa). You could also look into integrating this part with Google Calendar and Google would send the reminder by email (and by sms some day soon). Better to use the good tools which are available out there instead of investing in the reinvention of the same.

• Dental Growth: The dental growth chart is very impressive.  Against each teeth you can enter the date of fall.
  Suggestion: There are many people like me who can’t identify which is the top/bottom part. Offer help.
• Health module: This has two options Medical and Food. In Medical you can enter your Doctor’s name/address etc. It has a note “This is ‘private’ and only available to editors.”
  Feedback: Who are the ‘editors’? The parents or Hiraj.com team? There could be few parents who may not want Hiraj.com team to access any details from their account 

   

Few recommendations for the site,

• The portal needs to be proactive in sending messages to the parents (may be it already is, this is just a feature suggestion). For e.g. keep informing the parents about the upcoming shots the kid has to take (polio etc)
• First time parents have a huge challenge in figuring out why the kid is crying! Add some tips (is the kid’s tummy hurting? Has it passed motions?)
• Suggest books for parents (especially for the father as all the tough job is handled by the mom!!). What kind of music would be soothing for the kid?
• Have links to Baby Names as most parents decide on the official name only after 6-8 months.
• Timeline feature is good which shows how the baby has progressed over time but it would be nice to have a one page summary which at times you may want to print (sorry for killing trees)
• Add a “First Time” section in which you can record the first time he/she walked, got potty trained (what a relief, isn’t it!!). The site allows you to add these customized notes but giving such hints would be nice.
• Add a section for noting notable incidents – kids come up with some one liners which can be ‘usually’ very embarrassing to parents but then they are kids, they speak the truth! Note it down in his/her diary. Let the kid know what all the parent had to do to cover up these one liners! I believe these are the best things a parent-child can share as the time passes by. They are priceless and for everything else you have..you know what!

Revenue generation options,

• List Montessories, play homes, schools in your area (based on pincode of the parent).
• List astrologers in your area or the online ones. It may sound old fashioned but in India it is a reality, accept it.
• List doctors in your area.
• During summer holidays based on the age of your child, notify parents about Summer Camps in your area.

What is the life of an account on Hiraj.com? Will I keep using this site even when my kid is above 10 years? I doubt it but one advantage Hiraj has – India has no dearth of new borns!

Overall this baby social networking site has potential if they keep adding features, especially based on what the users ask for. Ignore the valuations and exit strategy – everything will fall in place on its own. Just concentrate on the product. Good luck!

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