Discoverability

Just wanted to run through a few new features recently added to the site and talk about how "discoverability" is just as important as "userbility" when it comes down to web design.

Many talk about userbility for humans and end up with a site that has no userbility whatsoever for a search engine - sites must be designed with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in mind so that one can expect natural traffic from search engines.

Another element that you dont hear much about in web design is "discoverability." As the term suggests, discoverability is a way to design a site so that users can easily discover the content or services that you offer. Folks putting effort in driving traffic to their site via SEO or SEM (Search Engine Marketing) or through advertising need to realize that efforts should also be put into converting the user once they arrive at the site.
"Conversion" in this case means to get that new visitor to buy something (in the case of an EC site) or get them to discover something that will make them want to come back for more.

Here are a few new features which hopefully should help you think about how you can go about organizing your content.

Above: In the middle column you will notice a new set of tabs. Upon clicking on the tab "Figures", the browser will fetch the latest figure posts and load it into that tab without the browser refreshing - this should happen in an instant. This means that you can discover and get to more content from the top page.

The "latest" tab is loaded in the HTML with the index page so searchbots can still see the default content to crawl thus SEO is still enabled. Read up on my Blog Monetization post for more tips on SEO.
Folks who want this script can get it at DynamicDrive - its quite easy to use and appearance is managed by one css file.

Above: after clicking on the "Gundam" tab, the tab will be loaded with the latest Gundam posts in summary format.

In order to do this, before a new post goes live, I kick of a build which generates flat files from the database for each post that appears in any of the tabs. A process within the build then creates another flat file for each category which will be called into each tab. The file for figures lives here.
The link for the above file is accessible from the top page which means that I am creating a new shortcut for a searchbot to reach more content - getting searchbots to reach as much content as possible from the top page within a few branches is crucial.

The new header is intended not only to be a bit more safer for work, but also enable me to group categories under one image. For example, previously I had a pair of "eyes" for idol videos and another pair of "eyes" for idol photos - these two items are similar and yet competing with each other.

Through my own observation of user behavior, I discovered that a visual representation of a category as a menu item greatly improved click through rates. For example, a picture of Gundam as a menu item converts much better than the text "Gundam." If you want a high click through rate for a particular category then stick an image of a girl on it. This is the reason why we always had an image of a girl on the top page at MSN Japan - Yahoo Japan uses the same tactic too but on different pages.

Above: Previously, related items used to be just a text link. I changed that to an icon+title and got a higher click through rate. Now that I have changed the format to a summary and icon, the click through rates for related items have gone up to over 50%.

The idea was to have the items as part of the post where the user continues reading the summary instead of deciding whether to read more just by looking at the title and icon.

And this is for those who fell asleep reading this post. Its by my fave (probably) artist Peko-tan. That site could have blocked access from outside of Japan so if thats the case then get this wallpaper from somewhere here - click on the link at the top of that page.