In the last installment, I researched a few sites and made claims to the areas that stopped traffic. I think this type of discussion contains value for any blogger. I almost considered adding green lights and nailing a few sites, but I’ll keep to the current motif and only add stop signs to my case studies today. Be wary, though — green lights may be coming soon!

The idea of keeping traffic contained on our site should not be new to anyone who’s been blogging or site building for a while. At times, traffic can seem like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off — running around vapidly, then silently departing our world. How can we rein in traffic? We need visitors to dig deeper into our site, write comments, subscribe to feeds, and interact with our community.

Case Study #3

The Viral King website still has the new blog shine to it. The site features content related to viral marketing, and does so with, well, with coolness. I love the look of it, the curved angles of the sidebar boxes, the over-sized RSS feed and Technorati favorite icons in the header, and, of course, the Viral King character. It all ties together well, and I’m sure new visitors to the site would give it more than a second look.

The site has a lot of stop signs in place. Remember stop signs keep the visitor from bailing out on the content — they force readers to look deeper into the site and idle a while longer. I already mentioned the two icons in the header as well as the character, but I think the header navigation may be a critical stop sign in the design.

The navigation separates itself from the blog in that it stretches the width of the window, while the content maxes out at 973 pixels wide. This makes a difference, not for its incongruence, but for its statement. It’s telling a visitor that its anchoring the page. The search form also appears in the navigation bar. If you need something, it’s there to show you. I would say this is a terrific stop sign.

The Viral King also offers a free Viral Resource Report, which adds another crucial stop sign. Offering free information in the form of downloadable content places your site onto a reader’s hard drive. When they open the ebook days, weeks, or months later, they will likely make a return trip to your site and opine on blog posts. It’s a great stop sign technique.

Lessons Learned from Viral King

The Viral King displays the site navigation in a way that doesn’t detract from the site’s balance, but does illuminate the content. Having over-sized RSS and Technorati icons ensures readers subscribe to your content in order to find you later. Once again, it pays to have a clean site with well thought out placement of graphics. And the Viral King character, definitely shines.

Last night I took the time to install the WP-cache plugin. I held off installing this plugin due to knowing nothing about it. I was afraid if I installed it, I might cripple my site, forcing me to ressurect an older backup then reconfigure. After reassuring myself, I stepped through the fear.

I figured WP-cache was a good solution since my site would sometimes hang while loading various ads on the sidebar. I knew a cache would fix those types of problems. So I searched the Blogosphere for information on completing the chore.

I found many sites describing the process. I found most of the trouble was with permissions. Thus another search began for securing Wordpress when using the wp-cache plugin. I found an article detailing how to handle security problems with the wp-cache plugin installation. It helped me straighten out some of the finer points. Once I finished with that, I tweaked an .htaccess file then checked out the wp-cache administration area.

Administering the Cache
You can modify how long a cache page remains on the server. The default of 3,600 seconds (60 minutes) seems like a good amount of time for the traffic I receive. I kept everything the way it was, after toying with all the settings of course. Then I went back to my home page and right clicked to select view source.

My page was loading in half a second! I wanted to see what other sites had in terms of speed. I felt like a grease monkey webmaster daring to look underneath the hoods of others’ sites. I knew Problogger uses the wp-cache plugin. His site would crash often if it wasn’t for the cache. I visited his page and right clicked to view the source. That’s when something interesting happened.

I understand why the Problogger site loads slower than my own. I do. That wasn’t the realization that occurred. What did occur? I discovered a few monitoring services Problogger uses. He very well could have written about all these services too, but I just found two sites in particular I had never heard about. I felt like a sleuth.

ClickTale.com: A site where you can record, watch and understand. The service looks amazing. Basically the hosted software records movements of mouse clicks then allows you to play back your own traffic history. I love the idea of it, but haven’t tried it out for any tests. I do remember Darrin talking about the heat map feature, which is also part of this service.

103Bees.com: This site analyzes search traffic to help you optimize your site. I’ve placed the code on my pages and will be monitoring how well it does. The service seems fairly good at what it does. I’m going to test it out for a few weeks, then write a little bit about the results.

It Pays to Look under the Hood
The exercise started out simple enough. I wanted to find out how my site’s speed measured up to other blogs. I found my site does serve up fairly well and I also found a few new tracking solutions. It’s just what I need — more stats!

Have you noticed an increase in my site’s load time?