When I first started blogging, I used to look at the stats about four times an hour. Now I never do. I suppose that’s the true for anyone who has a website. I thought I’d take a look to see what’s up. I’ve been using reinvigorate.net since February. I use to use it back in the day, then they went away. Now they’re back. I’ve been pretty inconsistent with stat tracking, so I don’t have the long history.
After all these years, I’m still suckling on the j-walk.com teat. Time to send John some Omaha Steaks, I guess. Keep my sugar daddy happy.
Last week I signed up for crazyegg.com because I saw their heatmap and thought it was cool looking. I couldn’t capture the whole thing, so here’s a couple of shots.
This was over three days. What I learned was that nobody uses the monthly archives. Why would they? I should get rid of that and put something useful there. Maybe a book-of-the-month or something. Or maybe I’ll list the most commented posts. If you have a suggestion, leave a comment. If you have a website, give crazzyegg a try. It seems pretty cool.
The Previous Entries link gets a lot of love. Should I move that to the top? Or is it being used because people get to the end and that’s where they want to click that link? Or should I put in both places?
If you have any suggestions for the blog layout or content, my comment box is always open.
Dick,
I regularly use the archive discussions. I’m not as advanced as most here and I use this blog’s fabulous content well after it was originally posted. Right now I’m into using SQL server data imported to Excel through VBA to produce reports. Many of the discussions I use are from 2004! Thanks again for the fertile Excel garden!!
Brett
Brett –
Do you use the archives, or do you search for what you need? When I read Dick’s post, I figured losing the monthly archives was no big deal, since I can find the content easliy enough.
Dick;
I am the same as Brett. Been using Excel and related things for a long time but trust to reference in place of my own memory which at 57 is completely unreliable :) There are many archived threads I come to or have links to for reference and or search continually.
Thanks for your dedication and that of your fellows!
Please don’t get rid of the archive links. They’re a blog standard, and navigation to old entries is extremely difficult by other means. Because you have many months to list, perhaps a drop down would be a nice space saver. I’m pretty sure there are WP plugins that will make this easy.
I agree that archive links are fairly useless. They give no context as to the content you’re getting. The search box is much more useful.
Jon,
I do a search. I thought Dick was talking about the content, not just the pointers.
No I’m definitely not getting rid of any content. I know that the people who come here to see what’s new is pretty small compared to the people who get to an old post via Google. And yes, I was talking about the list of months in the sidebar. Jeremy said it best – no context.
Thank you Dick,
It is such a relief! You are keeping the context and I must learn to ask the proper question, that’s alright I can try differentquestions until I get some answers.
Another vote for dropping the month listings – I would much rather see more space devoted to recent comments.
I think that the category list and search are a much better way to find content than guessing by month…