Because there won’t be much tech news over the Christmas break, and because I’m not going away this year, I’m using the time freed up to work on optimising the Connected Internet blog.I’ve made good progress on improving the page loading speeds, and I’m now starting to look at my theme. Replacing the WordPress search engine with Google’s engine and removing my search related plugins, has made me focus on my low search engine usage. This in turn had made me think about where my hotspots are, and my overall site design.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my blog template isn’t optimised for how typical users read blogs. Given that my site utilises a typical blog template, I’m now convinced that most blogs are poorly optimised for driving more page views from visitors, and are using the wrong hotspots.
Here’s my theory. Once the majority of blogs get past the point where its userbase expands beyond friends and family, the majority of traffic will come direct from other blogs and search engines. In both cases, readers are arriving at pages because they’ve followed a link through to a particular article.

So, the first thing that they are going to do is home in on the article and start to read it. Hopefully if the article is any good, then they’ll reach the bottom of the article, which is normally in the middle of the page. That’s when you’ve got to hit them fast with something else to read or do quickly, or they are going to leave.

So, why are most blog templates, including mine, bad in my view? Well, we’ve all fallen into the trap of designing templates that work like, or mimic destination sites like portals, where a user comes in ‘blind’ and decides what they want to do when they get there. For destination sites, hotspots are at the top of the page as this is where the user starts scanning for their first content ‘fix’.

However, most blog visitors don’t come in blind i.e. they’ve already decided what they want to read on your page first; the article that was promoted to them outside your blog on a search engine or another blog. I believe this means that the key hotspots for blogs that have grown beyond the friends & family traffic stage, are below the post content and to the side of it. Definitely not at the top of the page as for destination sites.

So why do I think my template and most other blog templates, are bad? Well, take my search engine placement for starters. If I really want to drive usage, surely this should be positioned near the area of the page where users are looking for something else to read i.e. near to the bottom of posts.

Why have it at the top of page, away from where users need it? All, I’m doing is forcing users to scroll to the top of the page. What is probably happening is that most new users to my site, which accounts for 87% of my usage, don’t even realise that I have a search engine that includes google search that they could use, and are instead going directly to Google to search, where they’ll probably end up reading a similar post on a competing blog, which they could have found on my blog. I’ve already seen my search engine usage quadruple from the quick fix I’ve done of adding a search engine box under my Related Posts.

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