Six days ago I’ve switched from Plone to WordPress, again. I want to take my blog and web site into a new direction so I wrote a bunch of drafts. But something unexpected happened. It already got a new life and I only published one new post (which wasn’t very popular either).
Analytics says that in the last 7 days I was already 31% better than the previous 7 days. And I’ve been running WordPress for less than 6 days. Furthermore, I’ve had rather large downtimes, about 24hs, as I moved things around, installed plug ins and wrestled with Apache. So, all in all, the improvement was rather large.
My hyphothesis is that WordPress presents the information in a much better way, both for humans and computers. For computers I mean that it’s more easily indexed, it pings other aggregators and who knows what else. You could say it’s very SEOed.
For people it’s easier to use and more familiar. People are used to looking at blogs that look like that. I don’t think this is to say that WordPress is better than Plone, I still believe that Plone is the best CMS out there, but the skins and design and the way the information is presented in list and topics should be improved to be more like WordPress and/or Mediawiki.
The really important lesson is that when you are making your own web site, maybe your own product with your own functionality, the presentation should be something familiar to the users. A good example would be Hunch, which you could say it’s a carbon copy of Flickr. Except that it doesn’t have anything to do with pictures or images! They made an interface that looks familiar for most users, so they can learn what Hunch does without being scared right away.
Reviewed by Daniel Magliola. Thank you!
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I wonder if it also has something to do with the fact that many of your previous entries showed up again in people’s feed readers because of the change in platform. I know I read a few of them as if they were new. Maybe others did the same (but unlike me maybe some of them clicked through to the original post).
Rory, that’s a good point. I’ve changed the feed address but then I made a redirect so that the main old address would still work. So maybe you are right. We’ll see.
Yeah, I got all your old posts again in my feed reader.
John, Rory, did you actually went to my site to read any post? If not, then I’m not counting those as views, only as feed downloads and that should be more or less constant.
The articles in the feed should be complete and with better formatting, so there should be even less incentive to go to the site.