I’ve been doing some quasi-testing on different blog layout styles to see what kind of layout converts better. The two styles I’ve been testing are the “magazine” style layout like and the traditional style layout like the one that this blog uses.
I wanted to test out the magazine style layout because I liked the idea of a blog looking more like a traditional high-end website, while still being able to use the traditional wordpress content management. Wordpress makes it sooo easy to manage your content… I love that!
Before I get into the test results, I want to make it clear that I hadn’t really planned to test this because it didn’t occur to me that using either of these blog layouts would make THAT much difference. After all, both types were professionally designed and looked pretty good.
In fact, I didn’t expect there to be any difference at all… then I started comparing the site stats for each layout type over several different niches.
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When people start analyzing their website traffic, one of the statistics that’s always included is unique visitors. In other words, your traffic statistics always includes the number of people who visit your website for the very first time.
For a lot of websites, this number can look very good until you dig a little deeper and find out what your bounce rate is. A bounce is when a visitor lands on a page on your website and never clicks through to any other pages before leaving. Therefore it follows that a bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who land on one of your pages and then leave without going any deeper into your website.
Unless you’re talking about a landing page that’s designed for a specific purpose, like sending visitors to an affiliate website, then a website that has a high bounce rate is highly undesirable. I don’t know about you, but I want my unique visitors to come on in to my website, take their coats off, and stay awhile. I want them to click around and visit several of my pages, subscribe to my ezine, make some comments on my blog, and generally make themselves at home.
I’m betting that you feel the same way.
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