Apr
Customising The User Experience On A Blog: An Experiment
A few months ago, I made the conscious decision to turn the Location Independent blog into what I call a “proper” business. Ever since then, I’ve slowly been working on the nuts & bolts of the site to put in the foundations that have been missing so far. These include:
- A more strategic plan for the overall direction of the site.
- A more complete portfolio of products/services – working through creating these now and we should soon have a good portfolio that addresses the needs of each main audience of the site at various different price points.
- A more customised user experience for each type of audience.
It’s the last point which I find really interesting when it comes to blogs, as so few blogs do this.
Most bloggers don’t sub-segment their audience nearly enough which tends to result in a generic experience for all types of visitors and readers. If you model best practice marketing & customer experience, then what they really should be doing is looking to provide a more customised experience for each type of visitor…which means they also need to define each type of visitor to their blog.
For a practical example, I’m trying an experiment on the LI blog for the next few weeks & months. If you head to the site, you’ll notice that the home page has changed completely.
And if you delve deeper, you may notice some very subtle changes depending upon which route you take…they’re not obvious but they are tailored to the type of reader that may be reading the post/page.
It’ll be interesting to see, from a business perspective, whether this has an impact on the key stats for the site – and of course sales of the products. I’ll let you know…
I really like how you segmented your audience into different categories on your blog. It is very clear and easy to understand. Too many sites have far too many ads and clutter that make it difficult to navigate. I often visit sites where I don’t even know what the topic is. I hope you share the results of your experiment.
Thanks John – it’s something I’d been pondering for a while and so far seems to be working out well…took quite a while though but I think will be worth it in the long term. Will definitely do an update post on the experiment sometime when I have more data and share the results…