New Site Features
January 6th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under
Having a stable server for the last few days has allowed me to finish the site design work I wanted to do over Christmas. I’m quite happy with the results and I think the template is subtly cleaner and more efficient, and the navigation links have been improved considerably, and I’ve already seen the benefits in site usage. I’m quite happy with the result and now I can concentrate on posting and building up blog and forum traffic in 2007.
Some of the changes aren’t that obvious, but here’s a full list of the ones I can remember doing:
New Features/General
- I’ve created a new forum. Although there haven’t been a lot of registrations so far, a lot of interesting and useful information has already been listed. If you haven’t checked out the forum yet, then I’d recommend giving it a go
- Made changes to how comments get posted on blog, which has totally eliminated all comment spam without a plugin
- Replaced the WordPress search engine with Google Search: It seems to be much better at finding results, and it has definitely encouraged more readers to search my site for posts
Navigation Improvements
- Header Navigation: Added a new header with important navigation links, including a vital subscribe link. I’ve also added a similar set of links at the bottom of the sidebar
- Reduced the number of categories and merged a lot of my UTW tags to make navigation simplier
- Reduced the length of the sidebar by using Tabbed Navigation. This has allowed me to group similar types of links to make it easier for users to follow, whilst at the same time making all options available to users and highlighting the ones I think are the most useful
- Added Tabbed Navigation at the bottom of my posts. This has gone a long way to reduce the ‘noise’ that was there previously, making it clearer to users what they can do next. I’ve also incorporated a search box so that users can search my site for more posts once they’ve finished reading mine, or the whole internet within my site without having to leave
- Added ‘Share This’ to my posts so that my social bookmarking links are nice and tidy
- Combined my Skyscraper ad and Vizu Poll to save space in my sidebar
- Added smaller MyBlogLog images
- Removed Snap Preview as it was getting annoying
- Tidied up my Trackbacks and Pingbacks so that only the title and site name are shown, and no more massive excerpts
SEO/Revenue Optimisation
- Improved My Meta tags: I’ve done more work on these since making this post, so if you want to learn more leave a post in the forum
- Added a new Adsense link ad to my Tabbed Navigation boxes, and the performance has startled me. In the past I’ve had no joy with Link Ads, but my current Link Ad is now my second best performing unit
- Added more Adsense channels so that I can better track which ads are doing well, as well as adding more Adsense section targeting to my pages
- I’ve added my site to dozens of directories. I didn’t believe this was a good use of my time, so I paid $5 for someone to add me to 60 P5 and P6 directories. I’ve also rejoined BlogTopSites and at the time of writing I’m #2, which is nice
Plugins
- Even though I’ve got a shiny new server, I’ve still made an effort to reduce the number of plugins I’m using, especially the very intensive ones. I’ve managed to reduce the number of plugins I use from 35 to 28, despite adding a few new ones this week (full list here):
- Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro Plugin: Despite having problems initially with this plugin, I gave Angsuman admin access to my site and he very quickly found the problem. His tweaks were so good in fact, that the translated pages actually load faster than the real pages! You can try out the plugin by clicking on any of the flags at the top of the sidebar. The real beauty of this plugin is that the translated pages will appear on non-english search engines, which will increase my site traffic
- aLinks Plugin: Together with my Chitika Shoplinc module I’ve been able to add shopping links very quickly throughout my site which has added a nice new revenue stream (4th behind Adsense, Feedburner and Text-link-ads). I expect this to grow as I write about newer products in 2007
- Themed Login and Register Plugin: This plugin has allowed me to theme my login pages and to control what pages and content users see when they login/register/logout
- Smart Unread Comments Plugin: I’ve created a new Updates page which is listed in my new header nav, which lists shows the latest posts and other useful info. What it also does thanks to the Smart Unread Comments plugin is show you what comments have been left since your last visit (it uses a cookie). Thanks to the Themed Login Plugin this page is now the first page that users will see when they login, which will provide them a quick snapshot of what has happened since they last visited
- Feed List Plugin: This plugin has allowed me to add a new section ‘Forum Posts’ in the sidebar which shows the last 10 posts from the new forum. If you haven’t checked out the forum yet, then I’d recommend giving it a go
- Less Plugin: Ajay will probably say as usual that I can acheive this effect without a plugin. What the Less Plugin does is force ‘(more…)’ links from the homepage to go to the top of the article, rather than to the part after the ‘(more…)’. I think this makes articles easier to read, as well as ensuring that readers see my best performing ad unit
- Spam Karma 2 Plugin: The best spam handling plugin in my view. Although I’ve eliminated my comment spam problem, it’s nice to have SK2 as a backup (and the Math Comment Spam Plugin for non-registered users) and it is also catching all my trackback spam
- Super Archive Plugin: I’m still looking for a nice way of showing my archives, but for now I’ve used this plugin to display my (buggy) archives. I really want to display my archives like this page, but I can’t find the plugin (can anyone help?)
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Comment by Ajay on 6 January 2007:
Well, you got me right on reducing plugins
Does Smart Unread comments work only for registered readers or all readers? It could load your server in the latter case.
I need to get aLinks installed with yout Chitika plugin ASAP
Comment by Everton on 6 January 2007:
it was causing problems on my old server as I had it on all pages. I think it’s ok now as it’s just on the ‘Updates’ page.
I’ve put a conditional loop on it just in case so I can turn it off quickly if my site load gets too high and it starts to struggle.
Comment by Ajay on 6 January 2007:
that makes sense.
Comment by Everton on 6 January 2007:
Update: I just tested it and it affects all pages, which makes sense as it needs to keep a track of all activity.
It’s definitely a big resource hog, as it needs to keep track of the all the visitors I get every 14 days (how long it stores data… I’ve had just under 75k uniques for the last 14 days) and what pages they’ve viewed, and whether any new comments have been left on those pages since they last viewed them….i.e. lots and lots of processing, all at the same time if the site is busy
Comment by Ajay on 6 January 2007:
So I believe you disabled it?
75K!!! Damn…. I wish I got half of that
Comment by Everton on 6 January 2007:
I’ve had a busy two weeks, that’s why my VPS died. I reckon I would have broken 100k if I hadn’t had the outages - worst one was 36 hours, right when my site was booming.
I’ve left it on, as under normal load on the new server it doesn’t seem to be causing a problem.
I am going to ask Ryan in the forum how he’s managed to restrict it to just registered users, and how’s he added a ‘~’ if the comments on a post the user has commented on:
http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2007/01/01/weve-got-a-bunch-of-great-new-features/