A Rough Two Weeks at Futurelooks

We’ve been dicking around with a brand new design on the main site. We tried some very extreme changes, and as a results, we got kicked around pretty bad. Our Google Adsense dropped to a third, even though traffic remained relatively high. In fact, one of our articles got DUGG and we were unable to take advantage of converting those users. I easily missed out on a $300+ day. I think we did maybe a third of that?

I’ve switched Futurelooks back to the original design for now, while we rework the new look. I loved how clean the new style looked, but the Adsense performance was sub par. I’m going to track the heatmap on our old design to see if we can come up with a solution using the coolness of the new design with the proven layout of the old design.

What I want to accomplish is to have a less cluttered content area while making the header a little more compact so that we have more room to layout stuff. With over 41% of my users still using a resolution of 1024 x 768, we don’t have much choice. This however means that the forum redesign will also be postponed because we need to come up with a solid look for the site before the forum designer can step in and base his design around it.

When? Hopefully BEFORE December. Hopefully…