Serving Visitors
Ah, the troubled mind of somebody that does everything himself: Content, design and maintenance… So where do set my priorities?
Simple thought: I want to make some money out of this, therefor I need more and more frequent visitors that stay on my sites for a longer period of time. How do I get more visitors? Regular updates and quality! How do I keep them returning to my site and how do I keep them longer there? Regular updates, quality and user-friendly design.
As said before, at this moment the design is what keeps me from the other two aspects; regular updates and quality.
So, while designing my new theme, most important thing I have in mind is serving visitors. A shortlist of my train of thoughts for the new theme:
- Clear and clean lay-out
- Simple navigation
- Outstanding headlines
- Focus on content, extra\’s in the background
- Cross-browser functionality
- Easy sociable
- Good in-site correlation
That last bullet might even be the most important to serve visitors most efficiently. What I noticed from my statistics was the overall time spent by visitors on my sites… mostly under a minute. To me that is enough incentive to understand that what a visitor is being offered at first view (either on the main site or at a post\’s single page) is simply not satisfying nor a reason to click deeper into the site.
Looking at the current structure of my site, I see too much text-clutterings which at first sight do not stand out separately and therefor are more troubling than clear. Besides that, my usage of pictures in posts and outside posts is not a real extra to the site in general.
The list for my new theme has reached the status of ready to be implemented, so the building has been initiated. As I am not a code-expert, I have selected two themes that have the functionalities I need and I will mash these two themes up combined with the necessary extra script.
This saga will be continued…
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