I said yesterday i’d be spending most of my day today going through this blog and getting things done. That’s exactly what i’ve been doing. Here’s a list of the changes i’ve made;
- New 468 x 60 banner ad
- New ‘design‘ page
- Updated advertise page
- Dropped 10 unused tables from database
- Optimized database
- Changed paged order / sub page order
- Updated all plugins to latest versions
- Reduced xhtml errors on homepage from 29 to 18 (a lot are cause by essential plugins)
- Links / CSS / colours more consistent
- Added pagination to homepage
- Added a lifestream feature to footer
- New ‘popular posts’ section in sidebar
- Updated 404 error page which now displays error + a list of popular posts
- Added Google analytics within admin dashboard
The major noticeable changes are obviously the new banner ad slot at the top of the page and the new ‘popular posts’ section in the sidebar. Neither of these were particularly easy to get right – it took me hours to get them both working properly with wordpress 2.8 and integrated with this blog’s theme.
photo credit: Milleiroâ„¢
The ‘popular posts’ section is powered by the ‘popularity contest‘ plugin and the new banner ad is powered by ‘oio publisher‘ (along with my regular button ads on the sidebar). I also came up with the design for the current banner ad slot which i’m pretty proud of 🙂
So in general, lots of changes, lots of improvements and most of them good. This site has grown from day 1 and this year traffic will be hitting 6 figures (unique visits) for the first time ever. It’s a good time for me right now and it’s a good time for smemon.com but i’m not happy to stand still… there will be more growth.
I’ll be blogging about stats tomorrow but in the mean time, let me know what you think about all of the above changes and if you’d like to see any more…