Final Blogsolid design changes
Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 12:09 pm
I finally finished working on changes to Blogsolid.
Here’s what I changed:
Splash page is gone
…I know, I loved it as well. It’s one of the things which made Blogsolid unique.
But it was receiving 30% of the overall traffic and had a 36% bounce rate. It means that around 10% of all Blogsolid visitors were leaving before they even had a chance to lay their eyes on the content, get interested and perhaps subscribe. Now some of them will hopefully do it – the blog will be more sticky.
For those of you, who are here for the first time – untill yesterday there was a splash page on the front page of Blogsolid, which looked like this:
New posts were showing on “www.blogsolid.com/ideas”. The “ideas” page redirects now to the front page.
I added Feedburner email subscription
Usually, on my other blogs, the subscriptions statistics look like this:
The biggest piece of the pie are email subscriptions.
Currently Blogsolid has only 8 email subscriptions out of 600. This shows that there is a lot of room for growth in this area.
The pie for Blogsolid will probably never look exactly like the one above because majority of you are tech savvy and use RSS readers, but if there are those of you who prefer using email subscriptions – you can do it easily now.
I offer email subscriptions in the right sidebar and also under each post.
Related posts under each entry
I introduced related posts to the rss feed a week ago. Now these are also on the blog at the bottom of each post.
- They gives more choices for a visitors who reached the end of a post and will hopefully increase interaction with the site.
- They are also good for SEO.
Font is bigger
I planned to do something to make reading less straining on the eyes. Each time I proofread a post before publishing, my eyes were getting really tired. But I wasn’t really sure what to do. It was Suzan form StarSunflower Studio, who emailed me and suggested that increasing the font size might be a way to go. Thank you Susan!
I changed category pages
Categories now display lists of posts without teasers. They also list all posts it the category on one page, not only last 5 or 10.
I did it because:
- It is user-friendly – People click into a category, when they want to find posts grouped in it. Now they will have immediate access and clear visibility of all the posts. No more multiple clicks to get to earlier.
- One of the major SEO rules says that you should have all your content not further that 3 clicks from your front page. Untill now, this was achieved by displaying Blogsolid archives in the sidebar, but I removed them. Now each post is just 2 clicks from the front page thanks to category pages (Front >(click 1) Category >(click 2) Post).
I introduced monetization
Yes. I think it’s about time. I actually think I could have done it earlier.
You probably already noticed the “Advertise Here” button in the sidebar. I am using BuySellAds – one of the best known networks for bloggers. It’s nice, easy and quick to install. I set the price low for now – let’s see what happens.
Another ad space is below the post. I placed some referral programs there, which I particularly like:
- Chitika – an ad network, which can perform very well, without annoying your regular users as it shows ads only to visitors from search engines.
- Yaro’s blogmastermind programme. I was a participant of the first release of this programme in 2007 and it was quite satisfying. It should be even better now. It gives you solid basics.
- More to come. I will be testing various programmes to find what is it that you guys find most useful.
I use Google AdManager to rotate ads on Blogsolid. This is a change for me. Till now I generally used OpenX for all my sites, so I am quite curious to see how will Google do.
That’s about it, when it comes to design changes. Let me know what you think!
Juha @ Hiking in Lapland Says:
December 22nd, 2009 at 2:08 am
Category pages handling depends on how many posts you have per category. While you still have less than 50 posts in categories, it probably works just fine, but my finnish blog for example has 123 posts about Helsinki …
Jasha Says:
December 22nd, 2009 at 2:26 am
Ok i guess you’ve done a great job, still i’m not satisfied by the font settings. Let me explain:
In titles letters are too sticky and also they are too close with upper text, it makes confusion and it’s really hard to distinguish paragraphs.
Matt Lukan Says:
December 22nd, 2009 at 10:20 am
@Jasha – It’s true – titles are too close to the upper text. I’ll have to fix that one. But what do you mean by them being sticky?
@Juha – Congrats on having so many posts. It is true that you probably need a different solution – for example pagination in categories.
quinceandquilt Says:
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:38 pm
I’ve been looking around for well designed blogs–to see what works and what doesn’t–and I’m really impressed by yours. I know less than nothing about the technical end, but I’d make one suggestion. I think a serif font is easier to read, and I’m not crazy about justified margins. However, I guess it depends on your goals. I think both the existing font and margins make the website look serious and decisive. I hope you take these comments in the spirit they are offered: genuine comments from the lay eye.
Matt Lukan Says:
December 24th, 2009 at 6:55 am
Thanks quinceandquilt for your comments. I really appreciate them
I will be still working on the font to make it better and easier to read.
Paul B Says:
December 30th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I wonder if your traffic troubles might be a little falsely bloated. I came to this site from http://ansblog.com/2009/11/mos.....te-design/ where your site was listed, and I wanted to see it in person. I don’t doubt many other people are doing the same. When I saw the picture of your site, I felt compelled to visit being interested in what you had to say about “solid basics”. When I clicked the link, and that page was not there, I was immediately felt like I had lost connection to the information I was looking for. I think be eliminating your splash, you are loosing connection with those people looking for simple information.
Sü Smith Says:
December 30th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I am so glad you changed the font size. I love the look and feel of your site and am now much more comfortable spending a leisurely time here. Kudos. You Rock!
Paul B Says:
December 30th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Damn, some days I really need an editor.
Matt Lukan Says:
January 8th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
@ Paul B
The Solid Basics page is stil there: http://blogsolid.com/ideas/category/basics/ It is just the front page that is removed.
Jasha Says:
January 8th, 2010 at 3:03 pm
i meant that a good title has enough space for each word. Here letters in each word a bit too close each others.