Blog Reboot: Surfacing buried content
Technology — Posted on May 18, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Welcome to Youngstown Renaissance 2.0. After two years of posts, I realized that there was so much that was buried, never to be seen again. Well, that’s not quite true. Several posts were highly ranked by Google and getting found just fine.
But, if you came to the home page looking to get a sense of the place, I wasn’t sure you really could. I found an approach that featured the latest posts with large photographs, listed other recent posts with nice thumbnails, highlighted recent posts from the principal categories on the site and offered several other serendipitous ways of discovering all the accumulated information.
On the right you’ll see four tabbed boxes, featuring the most popular posts (starting right now in terms of visitor counts), the most recent comments, a sampling of random posts and a tag cloud. I decided there would be some advertising, as I seem to be spending a lot of time blogging, and though admittedly it’s already paid off personally, I’m crossing my fingers that it might also generate a bit of revenue some day…
One of the most exciting features, I think, is the related posts list. When reading an individual item (like this page), you’ll see a list of like topics in the sidebar. My hope is that this will invite you to look at another post or two before you go.
As always, I welcome your comments and suggestions on the changes. I am grateful for your readership and look forward to continuing the conversation.
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Tags: blogs, tech
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12 Comments
Very nice update to the site. The layout is nice and I really like the related posts section.
Thanks, Mike, I appreciate your feedback.
Great job on the redesign Ty, looks clean and fresh, and from a marketing perspective, thanx for not shoving a big “new and improved” banner somewhere over the content, lol, I hate that…..Scott
Thanks, Scott. Yes, I wanted to avoid the big “Now with bigger fonts!” banner. I also hate “Welcome to our site!” stuff and try to steer clients toward a message with longer legs that accomplishes the same thing.
Hey one more thing….You gonna add a links page to this, you are how I keep track of a lot of the other blogs I like to read. You have links that just dont fit on my blog and I forget about some of my fave’s until I see your site. Then again, there’s always Janko’s, lol.
It’s a good question that I haven’t quite figured out. I’m sure it will reappear in some format. The list had gotten too long and in need of pruning. Now I just have to figure out the right strategy.
Great Redesign!
Much thanks, Lou!
I like the redesign Tyler… Very nice!
Thanks, Thomas
My Websurfing has suffered with the new job; this is my first visit. I really like it! I think we can finally put to rest the “more talented brother” debate. :-)
Different talents, my brother…