From the Gospel according to Paul Maden
A couple of weeks ago now I made the decision to revisit my old Travel Checklist site.
Once upon a time it was a nice little earner, pulling in around £20 a week in banner ads.
Over the years my traffic levels and the click-through rates both dropped as I pretty much left the site to its own devices.
At one stage I foolishly made a structural change, for the express purpose of trying to attract more clicks on the adverts, to the detriment of the user experience.
Fast-forward to today, and the site is well and truly in the doldrums, receiving approximately 10% of it’s peak traffic level.
But no more.
I’ve woken up to the fact that for the site to be a success, people must find it easy to use. The checklist has now been relaunched back as a simple list, much like its original incarnation. It has however been rebuilt using Bootstrap, a front end HTML, CSS and JavaScript framework designed to assist in the creation of responsive design websites.
In time I still plan to create an interactive system whereby visitors can mark items as booked, packed, ordered, outstanding or not required, and for the system to retain the visitor’s state during the days leading up to their trip.
For now though, I’m just happy to have my site back in a form that doesn’t make me feel ashamed, and hopefully I can now start to work on it once again as a serious site that I can take pride in.