Here’s the state of the art.
Bounce rate has been *bouncing* over the last 5 days. When it hit 70% on March 15, I almost flipped. I waited another day without making any changes and sure enough, it dropped back down to 35%. So what’s going on? Obviously I don’t really know, so perhaps we ought to hold off on changing anything else for the moment.
I have considered what I would change. WP’s becoming a limiting factor. I’d probably be better off with a Joomla deployment but I don’t have time to climb that learning curve. I want to get back to the fundamentals of movie making asap. So sticking with WordPress is the plan.
Overlay shows most of the clicks on the landing page happening on the link for the page itself, indicating that visitors might be getting confused. The next most popular link is the movies. The blog archives take up a significant space on the page and are hardly getting touched at all.
The obvious plan would be to remove anything that is not popular or confusing and emphasize what visitors are into. Since this is a movie project more pictures would be a good idea, with a few text links branching off into more specific content.
I think a test site would be worthy.
I just spoke to web design maven Lauren Di Scipio. She had several great suggestions, which I’ll paraphrase.
1) Folks come to the site and make a good faith effort to get oriented, but the landing page is not providing any orientation, so they have to look elsewhere.
This makes sense. The sidebar’s list of pages is like a mini sitemap and the title “Desire – our collective destiny” suggests a direction to take. Folks look at the map and try and find out what it’s all about.
2) It’s all about immediacy, we want to see what’s happening at this moment. Perhaps an RSS feed of the recent posts…
This is also interesting, having a static page is helpful to monitor visitor response but it kills the flow of updating.
3) More pictures, put a movie or movies there.