Design and Getting Links

by Paul on December 12th, 2005

If you have read me for any period of time you know the value I place on quality design. I know that in many webmaster forums you will find people saying that it’s the ugly sites that get the best CTR, and this may be true. However, I have always been in the business of building brands. I could spend my time pumping out ugly sites with low-quality content and waiting for SE traffic to come through and click on the ads to get away from my site or I can take my chances and go the DailyKos route and try to make over $50k/mo based on my content and brand (yes, it’s sickening how much they make).

This doesn’t mean that your site design shouldn’t involve ads, but I feel that with a great design readers and links will come much easier. Let’s look at Damn I’m Cute as an example.

Before Redesign

If you know anything about the Celebrity/Gossip niche you know that it has two qualities that make it quite appealing. There is the potential for a lot of traffic if done correctly (you think b5media is opening up so many Entertainment blogs just because they are fans of the celebrities and sites?) and that many of the designs are colorful and flashy. Knowing that many of the site owners in this niche wouldn’t go for a site that had the design of Work Boxers I didn’t bother sending some emails pointing to some of the entries that I felt were good. I definitely could have, but didn’t want to risk messing up my first chance with these guys so I waited and just continued to add content.

As you can see the site was doing a respectable amount of traffic for it’s first two months of existence. This is from 10/11-11/30 and are real pageviews from a Javascript tracker, not from robots and not from server hits. At its peak it almost reached 800 pageviews. Not the blockbuster many people might have expected, but I never claimed to own BoingBoing.

Anyways, this traffic is before getting links from other sites or any heavy SE traffic and that’s why I like the numbers. However, I wanted more and that’s where the redesign came into play.

After Redesign

Today DIC will reach 100,000 pageviews for the month of December in just 12 days. That’s 80,000 more pageviews than the Before phase in less than two weeks! What made this possible was that now when I send out an email showing a webmaster one of my entries I have a 100% conversion rate. Not only are they including my entries on their sites, they are also adding me to their blogrolls/sidebars. I can’t prove it, but I definitely believe that a lot of this has to do with the design of the site.

Quality design puts a foot into the door in helping to establish credibility. While that foot can get quickly stepped on with bad content at least you have it easier than the people who have to work with a crappy design and great content.

Every site in this Network is getting a makeover and every new site that launches will not do so until they have the new template. Since its launch last week, Sexerati has yet to have a day where they didn’t surpass 1,000 pageviews and I am not sure that would have been possible without the great design provided by Mike Rundle.

I know many will argue the impact a design has on a site, but it’s hard to argue whether or not it has an impact at all.

For a better perspective on the traffic for the life of the site here is the entire period from when I added that statcounter:

That just looks ridiculous.

UPDATE: Damn I’m Cute just got linked by Defamer today…and cropped out my watermark.

garrett
Dec 12, 2005 at 4:49 pm

It’s a very good point you’ve raised here. I dedicated a good portion of time to the design of my site http://indieanthems.com and this opened up the possibility of traffic from, not just the relevant music sites, but also sites like CSS and design galleries. I also think it helps differentiate your site from others so, even if you’re just rehashing articles from other sites, people will read yours because it provides a better user experience. But like you say, sites with ugly designs probably have higher CTR because people are trying to escape the horror…
Scrivs
Dec 12, 2005 at 5:21 pm

A great point Garrett. Unfortunately, most blog owners don’t have the luxury of having the gift of design or someone on their team that can tackle design issues. In this case I suppose it comes down to how fast you think you will see a return on your investment if you hire a designer to put up a template for you.
Entrepreneurship, blogging, and college - College-Startup.com
Dec 13, 2005 at 2:17 am

[…] Scrivs made an interesting post at Work Boxers about good design and getting links. He provides some graphs of his traffic before and after the redesign of Damn I’m Cute which, by the way, is an amusing blog that I read regularly. […]
Designer Sex Sells better than Generic Sex. » A Jack of All Blogs
Dec 13, 2005 at 10:36 am

[…] Some chump in his workboxers is spouting off at the mouth again. This time his wisdom has been decreed that Mike’s wonderfully sexy designs is what makes the difference for Damn Im Cute. And while I don’t disagree that the desings made a huge difference. I also think there is some other factors that need to be brought into questions. Pageviews is not always an accurate number. Consistency, Longevity, and the willingness to obtain links down the homestretch is what counts and Sexerati has a much better edge, as does Jack of All Blogs. […]
karmatosed
Dec 13, 2005 at 3:22 pm

Really raises the question of do hits maketh a blog? While they are important maybe it isn’t the only measure of a successful blog - really a debatable point. I do realise the importance of design, however and have experienced this myself after being part of css reboot and redesigning my blog. After my own still continuing traffic injection I now am thinking of ways to maintain and keep users, this is the next stage and probably just as important as a nice look and a whacking traffic rate.
Tyme
Dec 13, 2005 at 6:38 pm

Scrivs, I read your post a couple of times and honestly, so many things whirled around in my mind I could not think of what to address first. The FF post helps explain your logic (and your excitement) but I still find myself typing something out, deleting it, starting again, deleting. So if you can tell on your stats how long I’ve been on this site that’s why…LOL.

Congrats on your increase in traffic…but if your theory is true…explain Whitespace. Or this site. Or WIN and Gawker. Don’t they break your theory?

Ha! Made it with only asking one question!
Scrivs
Dec 14, 2005 at 12:33 am

No they don’t break my theory at all. For DIC I actively went out to let people know about that site, which is something I never did for Work Boxers and Whitespace. Also considering the content is different and the communities are different it honestly takes different approaches I think. Gawker’s design really wasn’t that bad when it started. It has since become dated, but with Gizmodo and Fleshbot the traffic was already there. Same with WIN when they stole Rojas for Engadget.

Quality design puts a foot into the door in helping to establish credibility. While that foot can get quickly stepped on with bad content at least you have it easier than the people who have to work with a crappy design and great content.

If design was the only key to success I wouldn’t bother with stressing about what I am going to write next.
Riverbelle
Jan 17, 2006 at 9:11 am

Some interesting ideas. Is it possible to get notified of future updates from your blog?

Cheers,

Wayne
jo
Feb 17, 2006 at 10:27 pm

Hey, can you tell me how to do something basic? I want to add a “stay updated, subscribe here” button to my site for readers to subscribe to email updates, but haven’t had much luck accomplishing this (I’m pretty new…)
Many, many thanks -
jo

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