Website changes October 17th 2008

Posted October 17th, 2008 in Miscellaneous Postings

This post is a quick note about an update I made to my site yesterday to finally add recent and related posts to the end of each post to see if I can increase pageviews per visitor.

Most visitors to this website find their way here via a search engine in search of a solution to a problem. They either find the solution they need and leave, or don't find the solution they need and go back to their search results and look at another site.

OK, so I'm making a lot of assumptions about user behaviour but I do exactly this myself with other sites, and the bounce rate and pagviews per visitor support my assumption.

In order to increase pageviews per visitor in the hope of a) getting them to become repeat visitors or subscribe to my RSS feed and b) having a higher chance of getting advertising revenue out of them, I've been wanting to add a list of related posts and recent posts to the end of each post.

Yesterday I finally set this up. A screenshot of an example that will appear at the bottom of each post is below:

 

Recent posts will appear at the end of each post, currently showing the 6 most recent posts (excluding the current page, if it would have been one of them). The related posts is a list of posts I feel are relevent or similar to the content of the current post. I have to manually set these up so most existing posts will not yet have a list of related posts. As I have time and as I write new posts, I will link them up so the user has more stuff to read when they find my site.

Next thing to do is add the ability to comment...