Fixpert

What is De-Lurking Day? Today is the day that I encourage all of my site visitors to go ahead and leave a comment. Say whatever you want. If your mind is blank, say hello, who you are, where you’re from, and what type of content you enjoy on the site (bike stuff, the random stupid stuff, web design stuff?).

Lately I’ve been looking at my stats, and without digging to deeply into it, I see that I’m getting somewhere between 50-100 hits a day. That’s not a ton, but it’s certainly out of proportion with the number of comments I’m getting. There are about a dozen people that regularly leave comments on this site (and I love you all). I think the posts and the site itself is more fun because of the conversations that take place after I publish a new post. The more comments, the better the conversations and the better the site!

I’ve also been using Crazy Egg for some real estate analysis on my site — to see where people tend to click. I’m going to do a full write-up on Crazy Egg soon, but in the meantime, take a look at the aggregate activity on my homepage, the brighter the spot, the more that area is getting clicked:

I’ve noticed that the Artwork tab is getting a lot of action, but I haven’t posted anything new there in a long time. This has inspired me to really beef up this section, since I wasn’t sure if folks were even interested in that. Web Design and Bike Lane are also getting lots of clicks, which is great because these three categories are the ones that I am most interested in.

Gadgets & Technology posts will still exist here and there, but that tab will likely go away, and I think Random just needs to get renamed to set better expectations of what’s there. Those posts tend to be on the personal side, and I have a feeling if I rename the tab Personal, it will sound juicier and I’ll get more hits.

I am also thinking about totally re-working the right rail, the Recent Articles section is some prime real estate that I think could be better used. Oh, and just so you know, De-Lurking Day could easily turn into De-Lurking Week because I’m about to head out of town to my friends’ wedding in Hawaii! Not sure if I’ll have internet access on my trip, so just keep the comments rolling in, I can’t wait to see how many new peeps surface because of De-Lurking — you can do it!

This concept was inspired by Veerle’s Are you a lurker? posts.