New Design Explained
January 26, 2008
The new design of the Texas Startup Blog has been live for 15 days. The reviews have been mixed.
The Purpose - I began the Texas Startup Blog in 2005 to provide a resource for entrepreneurs. The result is more than 1,900 articles comprised of more than 1,000,000 words.
The Problem - I often include posts about my family, political beliefs and non-entrepreneurial ideas that interest me. New visitors to the blog are just as likely to find a post about raising venture capital as they are to find out about my son’s views on global warming. Visitors who expected startup content and found something else rarely returned. I wanted a way to better ‘merchandise’ my startup content for new visitors while continuing to post other material.
The Solution - We implemented the current theme so that new visitors would be able to find startup related content immediately. Of course prior readers still get the chronological posts via RSS or on the Blog page. Lots of my old readers evidently simply visited the front page and as a result the new look is frustrating. Once I point them to the ‘blog’ category they are fine, but it is hard to talk to 25,000 people.
The Result - In the last 15 days I have had more than double the normal readership, previous we had estimated we had 25,000 regular readers, our new estimate is now 50,000 regular readers. We will see if this trends holds up…
