andreasviklund.com

While working on the new site design and the updated content structure, I have spent a lot of time going through my site statistics to learn more about the way this site is used. Out of all the tools I used for this part of the work, Google Analytics proved to be the most useful. Analytics has a "site overlay" feature that made it possible for me to browse my own page while the link popularity was visualized above each single link. Together with lists of navigation trails, landing pages, exit pages and time spent in the different areas of this site, I got enough information to learn how I should build the new site navigation - and which links I should highlight on the new frontpage.

For example, there is no use of having links to monthly blog archives in the sidebar since they are almost never clicked anyway. Instead, I could just highlight the link to the archive section where all the posts can be found anyway. The categories are not used very much either since most visitors click on the category links for the post that they are reading if they would want to read more posts from that category, but they are still useful to quickly find posts about specific topics - especially from non-blog pages.

I have started to make small changes now, so that I can see how it affects the usage of the site. For example, the montly archives are now removed. More changes will be made during the next couple of days, and you will probably see the new layout and content structure take form, piece by piece. Doing this detective work has actually been much more fun that I thought it could be. I've learned a lot from it, and much of it makes sense when I look at my own clicking habits on other websites. It will hopefully help me make this site a little better, but I will also apply the knowledge on my template design work to bring in some new ideas there. It may not make any major difference, but it is good for the inspiration…