While I am proceeding with the update to The Closet, I have other sites that demand a bit of attention. It is probably not set in stone, but I redesigned the info page format for the More Info pages of the Closet. I will be continuing my efforts with The Closet, but I can’t neglect some tweaks and updates to my sites that are now producing traffic.

My Viral Email Archive site is my highest traffic site at the moment. I need to keep adding content there to maintain its position. There are some other tweaks that I want to try to make the site more productive as well.

My Mixing Live Sound site probably has the greatest potential of my current crop of sites and does see a reasonable amount of traffic. I have several original articles as well as several reprint articles on this site. There are some minor layout tweaks to do and I need to add a good bit more content. I have a list of search terms that I have been saving from the daily analytics. I may also check in with WebMaster Tools to find the best order in which to provide additional content. This site is consistently my second highest traffic site and my site with the highest quality traffic.

There is a good deal of interest in my Mixer in a Box site as well. This is my site introducing the SoftWare Audio Console live mixing environment that I have been using for the last year and a half. I have several pages of content planned for the site. I also want to do some layout tweaks to this site. I had a little bump of traffic from Indonesia due to a mention on a local forum there. I get steady international traffic to this site as there is a good deal of interest in mixing live sound on a computer.

As I go through my analytics information I often have ideas of things that may work for the various sites. I mark these down in my ‘ideas’ list. I have a lot that can be done if I will only take the time to follow through on the ideas. Many of the ideas are brought to light by my current understanding of web design and web development. I do continue to read on the subjects. The trick is to balance the reading time with the doing time. One needs the knowledge to become more effective, but the new knowledge also needs to be put into practice for it to be of benefit.

Work has been interfering with my web play time, and it is only going to get more in the way for the near future. I do and will have things to post to the AudioArtSound blog though. I did write an article for my site Selling on Your WebSite this evening. The article is titled ‘Traffic is not Enough!‘ It talks a bit about the importance of targeting the traffic that you draw to your website. The title is a link to the article, if you are interested.

While I was paying attention to that site I also did some minor updates to reflect my most recent site configurations. I had brought the site up to spec last month, but as I go I think of some small things and learn some new tricks. I took care of some back office tasks, tweaking the code and css, and made minor cosmetic changes. I have been adding my navbar background to the left nav box recently, color coding all the nav areas the same. I have also been putting a background in my right column ad box because I use both 12o and 160 pixel skyscraper banners there with a frame. The narrow banners look better, I think, with a background color to fill the frame.

I am in the process of updating many of my sites. I suspect that my natural tendency to explain about my sites on the home page has not helped in keeping visitors on the site. With my updates I am attempting to engage the visitor as soon as they land on the home page. I am moving almost all of the boring details to various boring detail pages for the insomniacs of the world (or those truly interested in details).

I am also attempting to make the site navigation more user friendly. I am installing a left nav box and trying to populate it with the things that the visitor will want to access. On some sites this will vary depending on the section, but I am using php includes so it will be relatively easy to make changes down the road.

I have completed the rebuild of the Web Pickups site using this philosophy and am now working on my background image site, Symmetrical Backgrounds. With Symmetrical Backgrounds I get some search traffic, but it does not stick as well as it might. With Web Pickups much of the traffic is deep linked but in the past people had to look around to find anything else of interest to them. By making the nav more intuitive I hope to hold the traffic that I do get a bit better.

The results will take a while to manifest, but I will be watching my traffic reports for indications that the design philosophy is working. My money is on the fact that it will work but only time will tell. You can check out Web PickUps (a comedy site) now and keep your eye out for the grand unveiling of the new Symmetrical Backgrounds (a web page background image site). If you check SB now and then keep your eye on it you will have no problem knowing when the update is on the web.

Post a comment to tell me what you think of the new designs. Please let me know if you find something that doesn’t work. There are a lot of pages on both of these sites (hundreds – not thousands) so getting all the linking right is a feat in itself. Thanks!

I am working on a major update to my site Web Pickups. I have the new home page up but not all modules are working (no content). The new home page will be much cleaner and present some real content instead of my mission statement that has greeted visitors up until this time. I will relegate that to an About Web Pickups page. Anyone that is interested in that sort of thing can go digging for it.

I am also moving the latest additions to a nav box on the left. I have ‘a thought for you’ quotations in a rotator in the box below the latest additions. On the right I have an advertising banner (along with my Google AdSense in the header). Center page has a picture (random rotator) and below that is a random movie.

I will keep my laundry list indexes for the sections, but I will also put the list into a nav box. On the movie pages it will be in a box to the left in my standard layout. On the pictures pages I may put it and the commercial message below the images. I am serving some fairly large images so I don’t want to limit my options as to image size.

The new home page is up on the site if you want to check it out. It will be there until I post the announcement here that it has gone live. You can follow the progress as I add the various rotator targets. I suspect that this layout will work much better than the old one.