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Finalizing a design for a ten year old blog to get visitors to content quicker

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A lot of focus goes into a home page, but to be honest, most of my audience lands on interior pages, an article on a specific topic that they’re searching for. Your homepage is mainly for those driven to the personality of your site, its content as a whole. So it pays to give it a look and feel to match the content. I sell mysteries, goose bumps up and down the arm, a shiver up the spine.

UPDATE 9-18: Since writing this article the site has gone through another metamorphosis. So don’t be surprised if you visit it and find it somewhat different, as the new focus for the homepage is on a series of books we’re releasing this fall.

THE FIRST LESSON I LEARNED about SEO was words attracted more visitors than photos. I do a lot of photography in historic sites and I’ve noticed if I got a photo of a house or location reported to be haunted, it gets about five times more traffic than the house next door. So I started collecting these stories. I’ve always been a fan of gothic horror stories from the past, so those went on the site as well. Since there was that much more traffic to this site than my others, I moved my historical articles here too. And finally, my own experiments with gardening which used to reside on a separate site, which focuses on poisons and plants associated with witchcraft and folklore found a new home here.

Short articles versus long?

The conventional wisdom is that short articles attract more readers, but is that really what you want as an author? Obviously if you’re wanting to grow your audience you have to appeal to a common denominator. But does it have to be the lowest?

What I’ve found is long articles get read too. Some of what I write is quite long, and I find through Google Analytics that the average time spent on these articles can be upwards of ten minutes. That tells me yes, people will read longer pieces.

It’s important to get people to where they want to be on your site quickly. I have a variety of topics I cover, so breaking it down into categories rather than particular articles makes sense. Graphics make for an intuitive click, and get a higher click rate than text links. They’re also much easier to hit on tablets and phones than text.
I still keep a couple spots on the homepage for featured articles. As most of the content on my site is based in America, it means I don’t get the lift I’d like from search results for articles about Britain, which has been my focus the past couple of years. Social media helps take up the slack, and visitors from those profiles often end up on the homepage. As a result, I’ve managed to double the readership on my British content in just a few months. UPDATE 9-18: Since writing this article social media and the redesign has increased readership to these articles by about 5%.
There was a time when the sidebar was seen as a necessity. The problem with that is, it adds clutter and distractions for the reader. It’s the difference between reading a novel and reading a newspaper. Besides, tablets and phones toss the sidebar to the bottom anyway. The current style favors wide content, but what few designers seem to know is a shorter line length makes text much easier to read. It’s those little differences that help to keep a reader on the page.
Large graphics on landing pages might seem like a luxury, but they are impressive on laptops and desktops. When viewed on phones, they’re normal size graphics and still large enough to have impact. Partnering with British artist Cate Davies brought beauty to the site, and more eyes on her work, which is a fair trade.
As I noted above, sidebars now fall below the content on most devices. More than half of the traffic to this site comes via phone and tablet. A better solution to the sidebar is related posts. If they manage to get to the end of what you’ve written, there’s a good chance you can keep them on the site by delivering more content of a similar nature. You can do this by hand, or with WordPress, automatically via a plugin. Another automatic feature of a WordPress site is after content widgets. What I do is send people either to a related post or the homepage. My homepage has the lowest bounce rate on the site, so it’s the logical place to send someone who doesn’t know where to go next. UPDATE 9-18: Since adding this feature and with the homepage changes, my bounce rate has declined by several percentage points. This might not seem like much, but with nearly 200,000 visitors per year, it adds up. 

 

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