Blog Design & Differing Value Of Visitors

February 18th, 2006

Two posts caught my eye today - they touch on topics that have been spinning around in the back of my mind for a week or two and I believe, just recently, I have found a connection between the two.

Jeff Jarvis discusses blog design and comments that “blogs have already become prisoners of their format… the problem are the templates”. I’ve been struggling with my template for a number of reasons. There are posts that I would like to have on a “front page” and others that I would still like to publish, but that I would like to have on a “page 2″. Also, my template doesn’t format properly in IE - my sidebar, popular posts/feedburner feed/flickr/… appears at the bottom of the page rather than in its proper place.

While slightly annoying, I didn’t think that either of these issues were too critical. I figured most of my readers read my content through an RSS reader or were using a browser other than IE.

This leads me to the second post I found interesting. Steve Rubel discuss various meme trackers. (I still cringe at the word “meme”)

I’ve been picked up by a number of the trackers over the past few weeks and they have helped significantly drive a large number of visitors to my site. Interestingly, the traffic that is being driven hasn’t resulted in a sizeable increase in subscribers to my feed. This seemed a bit odd to me and I’ve been thinking about it for the past week. I think I discovered the reason the other evening.

How are these two posts/thoughts connected? Oddly (or should I not be surprised?) most of the traffic coming to my site from the trackers are individuals using IE.

My mind hasn’t settled on why this is the case and I didn’t want to share this finding until I had collected my thoughts on the situation. But given the conversation that is starting around the two topics, I figured I would share what I’ve found and ask you for your input and thoughts.

Any idea why the traffic from these sites is from users surfing with IE? Any thoughts on the comparitive “value” of these visitors (I have an opinion, but don’t want to share it yet)?

(and if you can find where I broke my template, I’ll owe you one )

Viewing 6 Comments

Fraser 4 years ago 1 point
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Kent Newsome has some good input and shares some observations from his own traffic. You can read what Kent has observed over on his excellent blog, Newsome.org.

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http://www.disruptivethoughts.com

Fraser 4 years ago 1 point
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Philipp, I don't think it was the coffee - I posted on a few thoughts that hadn't been fully processed by my brain (they still haven't).

What I've found interesting is that my traffic has experienced some nice growth over the past two weeks but subscriptions haven't grown at a similar rate (or, at the historical traffic/subscription level that I've noticed over the short history of my blog). This seemed odd to me until I realized that an oddly large portion of the traffic came from IE users --- and IE doesn't render my blog properly (dropping the "subscription option" to the bottom of the page).

A possible explanation, and one that may explain a portion of what's happening, but one that I don't believe offers the entire explanation.

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http://www.disruptivethoughts.com

Fraser 4 years ago 1 point
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Kent Newsome has some good input and shares some observations from his own traffic. <a href="http://www.newsome.org/2006/02/design-rss-and-int...rel="nofollow">You can read what Kent has observed over on his e....

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Fraser 4 years ago 1 point
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Philipp, I don't think it was the coffee - I posted on a few thoughts that hadn't been fully processed by my brain (they still haven't). What I've found interesting is that my traffic has experienced some nice growth over the past two weeks but subscriptions haven't grown at a similar rate (or, at the historical traffic/subscription level that I've noticed over the short history of my blog). This seemed odd to me until I realized that an oddly large portion of the traffic came from IE users --- and IE doesn't render my blog properly (dropping the "subscription option" to the bottom of the page). A possible explanation, and one that may explain a portion of what's happening, but one that I don't believe offers the entire explanation.

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Philipp Schumann 4 years ago 1 point
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Hm, not quite sure what you're up to, here. Maybe I'm still just too tired (just having my 1st coffee over here) to get it.

Many RSS readers use the embedded IE WebBrowser widget. For example, I surf using Firefox, but I use RSS Bandit, which uses IE for integrated browsing.

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http://dualogy.blogs.com

Philipp Schumann 4 years ago 1 point
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Hm, not quite sure what you're up to, here. Maybe I'm still just too tired (just having my 1st coffee over here) to get it. Many RSS readers use the embedded IE WebBrowser widget. For example, I surf using Firefox, but I use RSS Bandit, which uses IE for integrated browsing.

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