[Up: content-centered design] [Robot Wisdom home page]
Most people think that the best way to increase the hitcounts of their websites is to add more or better content.But lately I've been realizing that my site has a lot of 'leaks' I could plug pretty easily, that would cause my hitcounts to go up a lot more quickly without changing the content at all. Because of some pretty basic mistakes, people are failing to find my site, or are visiting and never coming back.
The first most important leak is one I noticed by reading my referer-logs: by far the greatest portion of my traffic comes from search engines, and especially from Yahoo. I'd assumed that Yahoo etc would eventually find my site and index it, but this turns out to be untrue-- and as soon as I submit a page and get it added, traffic to that page makes a huge jump.
So my failure to seize that opportunity was effectively a gigantic leak in my website's bucket-- readership I could have been building, that instead went elsewhere.
Another leak has resulted from relocating my whole site several times: many links between my own pages broke and I never got around to fixing them. And my special 404-page got disconnected at some point, that used to catch most of these slips.
And another is just poor design-- a lot of my pages offer only a few basic navigation links at the bottom of the page (Up and Home and maybe Next), when they really ought to hold out a handful of related pages on my site that readers are likeliest to choose next.
(Conventional hypertext theory says 'Up' to the table of contents is fine, but I've determined that you'd do much better to reproduce the full ToC itself at the bottom of each page.)
I've also been noticing the things that other sites do that drive me away (their 'leaks'). Pages that are slow to load and/or render are the worst-- my Mac is only 75 MHz and html TABLEs are very slow, so I often get bored and bail out before they display.
The advantage you get from fancy layout just isn't worth that!
(The worst thing lately is teeny-tiny background gifs, that are rendered so slowly you can watch them flow down the page-- everything freezing until they're done, and freezing again to redraw, whenever you scroll!?!)
Unreadable text colors, too-wide text, too-small text, etc are all familiar problems. [more]
Special topics:
surfing-skills :
url-hacking :
open content :
semantics :
pagelength :
linktext :
startpages :
bookmarklets :
weblogging :
colors :
autobiographical pages :
thumbnail-graphics :
web-video :
timeline of hypertext
Anti-XML/W3C/etc:
structure-myth :
page-parsing :
firstcut-parser :
html-history :
semantic web
Design prototypes:
topical portal :
dense-content faq :
annotated lit :
random-access lit-summary :
poetry sampler :
gossipy history :
author-resources :
hyperlinked-timeline :
horizontal-timeslice :
web-dossier
Website-resource pages:
RobotWisdom.com :
Altavista.com :
1911encyclopedia.com :
Google.com :
IMDb.com :
Perseus.org :
Salon.com :
Yahoo.com
Older stuff:
design-lab :
design-checklist :
HyperTerrorist :
design-theory :
design cog-sci
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