Site Review

The Orient Lodge site is now a little over a month old and I thought this would be a good opportunity reflect on how it is going. The site is based on Drupal 4.4 without any special tweaks. I have played with the configuration trying to come up with the best layout. Is it better to have ‘blocks’ on the left, on the right, on both sides? I started off with them on the right, but I read some articles about how people read newspapers and websites that suggested it might be better to have the content on the right. I’ve now read some contradictory data, so I’m reconsidering this decision.

Also, how much space should be taken up by navigation, and how much by advertisements? Currently, I’m display the list of the most recent blog entries, the most popular content, and a list of entries by category for navigation, and underneath that I have various advertisement blocks. On my poor old screen, that means I have to get to about the fourth page scrolling down before I see any of the advertisements.

In terms of content, a handful of content comes from previously written articles and other material. About half of it is entries that I’ve written for Greater Democracy. With that, there is a large amount of political material here.

In terms of access to the site, it still remains fairly small. The internal information from Drupal shows around 250 hits a day. Google reports this as around 100 impressions a day. During the Republican Convention, the hit rate went up considerably, but it has now dropped back down.

The primary ads that I’ve been using are from Google Adsense. They provide useful statistic on how frequently your site gets visited. They also provide details on how many clickthroughs you have, what the clickthrough rate is, what your effective revenue per thousand impressions is, etc. In the first month of the site, I’ve received approximately 3500 impressions making about three dollars per thousand impressions, or just over ten dollars. That is a long way from making a living, but it is providing interesting insight into the traffic here.

What has been particularly interesting is to look at the advertisements that AdSense has provided. Much of it has been about setting up your own blog and political advertisements. That is about as would be expected. However there several interesting advertisements which I’ll highlight in another post.