You’ll notice I’ve made a few minor changes on the blog here, all of them intended to speed up page loads and improve the visitor’s experience so I’d like to hear your feedback.
First, I’ve completely removed the contextual ad displays from postings. They’ve never really made much revenue anyway, and lately the blog has been seeing some heavily increasing traffic. While the logic might be that more traffic should equate to more revenue from the ads, the fact is money isn’t the motivation behind this blog for me and I just don’t like having the ads in my postings. To me they seemed to break the flow of the posts, and if they bothered me I figure they probably bother others too, so they’re gone.
Also, I’ve removed the PlugIM, Sphinn, Digg and Bumpzee badges/widgets from above postings. I like all of those sites but the graphics pushed the posting down too far on the page for me to be happy, and also 1 or 2 of them often seems to hang from high loads at their site and cause my pages to load slower as a result–so just moving the widgets on my pages doesn’t cure the whole issue and now they’re gone.
I’ve also pulled the Blogrush and Technorati “My Blog is Worth…” widgets from the sidebar. I really tried with Blogrush, I think its a great idea that should have been more successful among social bloggers but it simply hasn’t been of value to my blog in terms of bringing in any new visitors. I know there were some issues and concerns with it concealing links early on, and while it seems they’ve corrected that and done their best to improve the service people just aren’t using it to discover new blogs. Its a shame because I myself have found a bunch of new blogs from it, and that’s what makes it such a great idea in my mind…but for whatever reason it seems like a lot of people are ignoring it as advertising or something and so its gone.
As for the Technorati “My Blog is Worth…” widget, it was a novelty when I put it up but after a while it felt sleazy to me to place a dollar amount out there like that so I’ve been meaning to pull it down for a while and just haven’t gotten around to it until I was making the other changes, and now its gone.
And finally I’ve updated the About page here. Mark over at 45n5.com gave me a kick in the rear with this posting on about pages a while back and I’ve wanted to expand mine since.
I’m hoping to have part 2 in the Niche Network Marketing with LAMP series ready for posting later today, in the mean time I’d really like to know what you think of the changes I’ve made and if they make a difference for you while visiting the blog?
Email this post
