We’re building a new WordPress site for a financial management company. They have a current blog, which we’re keeping up to date while we build the new site.
We’re not making any big changes at the old blog while we work on the new one — we don’t have authority to, in fact. However, we are making some small changes to make it more attractive in the short term.
If you look after your own blog and aren’t planning any big design changes, you might want to consider some small changes that can make a big difference.
Before we get into specifics, let’s acknowledge that merely having a regularly-posted blog with good content is good for your website from the point of view of SEO and conversions. Search engines probably won’t even notice the kinds of changes we’re talking about today.
Humans will, though. And human beings, not search engines, are the ones who buy your goods and services.
With that in mind, let’s have a look at the old blog:
There’s interesting content in the posts. However, the dense text is relieved only by huge CLICK HERE links. Rather than organizing the content for readers, these just break up the text and send people off the page.
We’re adding photos to the posts. Again, search engines won’t care, but human visitors will enjoy seeing some people in the posts, and the images we’ve chosen help communicate the message of the posts. We use iStockphoto for consistently high quality stock photos, but there are other sources if you have more time than money.
We’ve also added a little text widget to help readers find their way back to the main website. If you have your blog off site, this is a must. You can do something fancier than this, of course, but we just took ten minutes to add a couple of text links and a phone number. The twitter feed is also a widget, and just as easy to add.
We’re using more modern methods to add links that go offsite, and organizing the content visually with normal paragraphs and bulleted lists.
None of these changes takes a lot of time, but they give a more polished and appealing look to the blog. Does your need a little of this attention? It’s worth doing!
Leave a Reply