If you didn’t notice, I made a few changes on the site, and it was easy — I let the data do the changes based on site traffic.
This was based on a year of site traffic data through Google Analytics.
This is a conversation that I’ve had a few places.
I feel tag clouds are useless pieces of Web 2.0. Most executives think they make great demos. Users could care less.
Now I have the data behind the argument.
The highest tag from a page view perspective was requirements gathering, at 160 pages (39th highest request). After that it was usability (at 76). Silly Saturdays clocked in at 122.
Almost no traffic.
Tag cloud — gone.
A few posts, specifically Seven Reasons Why Agile And Scrum Works For Web User Experience which got thousands of views, I promoted to a new area for Top Posts. I’ll rotate posts through that region, but going through the data a few posts got a significant amount of traffic.
If users want to read certain content, they can have it!
The links on the right generated almost no traffic, so I removed a lot of them. I do think it’s good to have some resources for users, but they’re more often than not clicking on them within the body of an article, not in a sidebar.
Links, gone!
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
