One of the best things about doing this website has been that everything seems to fall into place perfectly. One of the reasons why I wanted to go with a professional theme for the website was so that I didn’t have to mess with it. If the website was earning the kind of scratch where I could pay for a $1,600 theme, I would have. I have been involved with previous projects that either the theme was a train wreck, or I couldn’t get a feature that would have taken it to the next level. Even in the first template for App Store Apps, I was able to tweak and mod it exactly how I wanted it. Thankfully we have been able to grow and expand(with features and styles) without a hitch. Because of that, I am able to focus on the content and not be hassled with the minor things.
Since the new layout there has been tons of news. . .
New visitors are up 20% – I don’t think this has anything to do with the new visitors(unless the website just has more of a ‘stickiness’ factor. Page views are up 100% – My goal with the new layout was to let visitors get to the content that gets pushed back from a blog style layout.
I could go on on talking about how the ‘bounce rate’ has dropped 20% and that the ‘average time on site’ has increase by 50%, but that’s not the point of this post.
The transition from the old layout to the new one couldn’t have gone any better.
I was able to keep the social links(digg, delicious, stumble facebook, etc), which are now at the bottom of the posts. I’m thinking about adding Reddit to this list, but if anyone has any other thoughts/suggestions I would love to hear them.
At the bottom of the old posts there used to be 2 lists(1 for related posts and 1 for popular posts). This was easy to add into the new layout too, but now we have 3 lists of popular posts(1 for paid apps and 1 for free apps and 1 for related apps).
I was able expand the RSS feeds. If you click the RSS Feed link at the top right of the website, you’ll see the 5 different types of feeds that you can subscribe to. Now if the universal feed flooding your RSS reader with unwanted posts, you can specific exactly what you want.
The front page currently shows ‘featured categories’ down the center. Currently I have the Games, Entertainment, Social Networking, Music, News, Productivity, Reference, and Utilities categories on the front page. If you think there is a category that should be on the front page that isn’t, don’t hesitate to tell me. I just picked some of the more popular ones(with the most posts), so I could have missed 1 or 2 that should be on there.
Congratulations on getting this all worked out Doug! It’s nice to know that your traffic has increased. I’m going to subscribe to your main feed now, no wonder I wasn’t receiving your site news in my RSS feeds!
Any chance you could add an RSS feed for just the Apps that are marked down to FREE?
@Quick thanks!
@Jeff, That sounds like a great idea, I will definitely look into that.
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