In the coming weeks, a redesigned spudart.org will be launched. All 25,000 comments will be back on the site–including all the comments from Facebook. I’m also hoping that all the blog posts will be categorized and tagged. Although that feature might come later.
From 2008-2011, spudart.org was regularly pulling in 70,000 visitors a month. But since I’m on an old platform (pMachine), my site is not structured well for google. So, the traffic dropped. While I still get about 5,000 visitors a month, it would be nice to bring the traffic back up.
The first step is getting the site back onto a contemporary platform to host all the content. Therefore, the site will be using WordPress, which powers 24% of the internet.
Eventually I’ll also switch over the email newsletter system from feedburner to Mailchimp.
What does this mean for you? As the site gets more traffic, and I get more excited about the new fancy features in WordPress, you’ll see more blog posts from me, with more great creative content! You’ll also be able to dig into more of the fun content that spudart.org has to offer.
It’s an exciting time for this website that has been around since 1999. The past 16 years has been fun, just wait for what is in store in the next coming weeks!
I’ll also share in the comments some of the progress that I’ve been making along the way with shifting the site over. This process has been an on-and-off effort by me in the past four years to switch over to WordPress! The end goal is almost in sight!
I’ve been commenting about the site move to friends over IM. Here’s a collection from the past couple weeks:
As I’m categorizing all my blog posts, one of the things I want to do is make my older blog posts more available. Make them less buried on the site. I also might make topic-focused ebooks based from the various blog posts. As I’m going going through all this, I just had a realization. It’s really kinda hard to read a bulk of my blog posts. Like, the current blog format is not the right format.
I need an easier way of browsing through all my posts
Whatever method I find is easiest for me to look through all my posts—that’s how i want my site to be structured
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since 2008, my site has seen a total of 5.8M page views. Kinda amazing to think how one of my youtube videos has gotten more views than my ENTIRE site combined for 7 years. (I have a youtube video with 6.8M views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnJ49hv5Rho
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i wonder what is a good length for wordpress slugs
ah. i have the answre from Matt Cutts
four or five words long
i was thinking of putting “blog” as the directory for my blog, so it’s easier years down the road when i need to redirect my posts.
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as i’m getting ready to move spudart.org over, i’m glad I ran the SiteSucker on it last night. Now I have a static html version of my site.
just in case i need to go back to certain old pages to pull the content for the new site
I’m really loving the ability to categorize and tag my posts. This is going to help me organize all the various posts on this site. Perhaps even make some ebooks.
whoa! This is a drastic change! Old design in the archives. The new look spudart!
Thanks! Right now I’m keeping the site really simple, because I have plans to add more stuff. For instance, I’m going to bring back the links section.
One of the keys to a successful site is to update it regularly. I hope to have a blog post nearly every day, but I will be posting several links every day. Every time I comment on a website, I save the URL to delicious with the tag “commented’. http://delicious.com/spudart/commented
That’s a few thousand right there. I’ll export those out, and import them into WordPress. Plus, moving forward, having new links every day will give the site a more refreshed look. I just have to decide if I want the links to be a side item, separate from the main feed. Or if I want the links to be merged in with the blog posts.
It’s so exciting to have a site that fits in with the SEO standards like:
* Keywords in the URL
* Content is not duplicated on the site (pMachine used several different URL formats, thus duplicating content onto multiple URLs)
* Mobile-friendly (Google ranks pages higher that are mobile-friendly. Plus, with 40% of people surfing the web on mobile, a site really has to be mobile-friendly)
Then there are other features that are sooo nice like
* Categories
* Tags
* Being able to search my entire site, and have the results come up fast. It’s truly fun to search through my archives for keywords like chocolate or tribune
* Being able to easily edit sidebars and menus
* Easy metrics that I can check in the WordPress admin
* With the ease of updating the sidebars, I’m looking into getting a “related posts” widget, so that way people stick around the site longer. Ultimately, it would be great to get people to see the value in spudart.org and actually subscribe via email.
All of this is such a breath of fresh air to be able to easily reorganize the site and potentially get more readers.
Another nice thing about WordPress—when I submit links to reddit, the “featured image” is used in Reddit. It used to drive me crazy when I couldn’t control what image would show up in the reddit thumbnail
It’s amazing how much less a brain works on three hours of sleep. I was up late last night fixing redirects and broken URLs on spudart.org.
I’m really hoping that Google updates the Search Analytics on my Webmasters tool. The graph still shows 11/3 as the most recent date. That’s nine days ago.
OH WAIT — The actual search page, with the bigger chart, shows 11/3. But on the homepage dashboard, with the smaller chart, it shows 11/9. Huh. Bummer, my search clicks are lower now.
I’d also love to see a huge drop in the number of pages indexed on my site by Google. Currently Google thinks I have 21,108 pages–mostly because my old CMS created duplicate pages with different URLs. I should really have more like 3,500 pages.
The main thing i need to do is start creating content that people will link to. Although it’s good to have a nice home base with my site that google likes, but I can’t totally bow down to Google. It’s tempting to get caught up in the Google race.
Bounce rate
My bounce rate is still really bad at 85%. I’ve done two things to try to fix it:
* Added the “related posts” to the bottom of each post (via Jetpack)
* Added a sidebar widget with the three most recent articles from the category of the current blog post.
That lowered it down from 90% to 85%. I really need people to start looking around the site. Because they should like what they see when they land on the site. My goal is to convert google visitors into subscribers.
Google Plus vs. Reddit
It’s funny how my weird Enceladus infographic got more likes and clicks from Google Plus than reddit. I think it was too bizarre for Reddit.
Although you have to hand it to the reddit community. They will click on the article before upvoting it. I could get about 10 upvotes, but then I’ll get 200 clicks. Whereas on Google Plus, the number of likes is almost parallel to the number of clicks. I really don’t think many of the people clicked through. I think most people just +1’ed it.
Email newsletter update
Full text articles are now available again in the http://spudart.org email newsletter! I just realized WordPress was using the excerpts. Right now WordPress sends the RSS feed over to Feedburner, who then creates the email daily and sends it out. I have plans to eventually change this over to WordPress.
To make the email newsletter shift less jarring for users from Feedburner to WordPress, I’m going to try to slowly match the familiar format of the Feedburner template over into WordPress. The first step in that process is to at least include some branding in the current Feedburner newsletter.
The Spudart logo is now in the masthead of the email newsletter. The logo will create a consistent element when the newsletter changes providers.
Comments author
I need to do a mysql search for “matt-maldre” in the comments, and change it to “Matt Maldre”
Google search increase?
I thought I saw an uptick in google searches yesterday. During peak days of the week, I’ll get about 70-90 google search visits. My wordpress dashboard said there was 147 visits yesterday. But that was ALL search engines. The google visits were at 85. Pretty average.
Stats for On-site search
Today I enabled Google Analytics to track on-site search. I was shocked to see that it was not enabled! Thankfully my other sites 57hits.com, christiannotebook.com, and mattmaldre.com had this feature enabled. I wasn’t sure if I should have “Strip query parameters out of URL” turned on or off, but Luna Metrics says to turn it off, so I did. I’ve come across Luna Metrics a couple years ago. They give good detailed advice. I should subscribe to their blog.
Bing webmaster
Whoa. I do not have spudart.org in Bing Webmaster. Daaaang. Bing gives me one-third of the traffic that google does. Needless to day, I just added spudart.org to my Bing Webmaster control panel—along with my other sites.
Footer
The site now has a footer, thanks to the advice of Orbit Media. The footer could stand to have some improvements, like more pages. But it’s a start.
Healthy living section
The first four pages of the health category now have just health posts. When I assigned categories to my blog posts, I did word searches across the database and mass-assigned categories. So there are posts that use the word “food” but have nothing to do with health.
#1 referrer in past year
Reddit easily takes the cake, because the spikes in traffic it delivers. But the longer term referrals came from pinterest.
reddit.com 3762
pinterest.com 1,836
gutefrage.net 1,433
stumbleupon.com 1,393
us.wow.com 966
facebook.com 599
chicagoelevated.com 228
forum.topic1147190.darodar.com 212
twitter 205
gapersblock 75
flickr 55
Links changed on top flickr referrals
I took the pages that have the most traffic from flickr in the past year, and changed the links on each flickr photo. Hopefully that should slightly help encourage Google to start using my new urls! Next up is to change the links on my pinterest pins.
I killed all the old blog pages
Growing tired of Google insisting on using the old blog posts with the variable in the URL, I just went in and killed them all. We’ll see how Google reacts. Hopefully, this should eliminate all links to old pages.
Navbar on old site updated
The links on the old nabber now all point to the correct pages on the new site.
Sitemap
There was an old page called “sitemap” at https://www.spudart.org/blogs/sitemap, so I changed the links in there to point to all the new pages. There are about 52 regular static pages, so I kept those links in.
Most visited posts
I did some Google Analytics and Google Sheets magic to pull the most visited webpages on spudart.org since installing Google Analytics in 2005. The results are on the new sitemap. I have one page with 1.5 million views. 10 pages with over 100,000 views.
htaccess redirects
Did a bunch of major work on the redirects. I built a redirect for any webpage with id=?, but then found out that it conflicts with the general redirects in each of the blog folders. (yeah, confusing, i’m not explaining it well here)
Bolder links
The text links inside the blog posts are now easier to read. I changed the CSS, so they are bolder.
Email newsletter sign-up, sticks on page
The right-column widget for the email newsletter now sticks on the right hand side of the page. When a user scrolls way down the page, that right column is no longer empty. It keep the sign-up form always available. Hopefully I get a few more email newsletter signups with that.
I’m so happy I got the custom content type to work in wordpress last night. Now my webcomic will reside on a directory called “comic”. I was going to use “webcomic” but in looking at the comics I read online, they almost all use “comic” as the subdomain.
I still have a bunch of work to do customizing the template, but at least I got the general fields to work and the page to load. I like the three main sections on my site now. Blog, Comic, Art projects.