Following Google’s recent Panda and Penguin updates, Cool Site of the Day has seen its traffic drop by nearly 60%. A renewed emphasis on visitor participation and customization will, I hope, reverse the recent traffic decline. Plus, more and more, I’m posting links to the daily cool site throughout social media.
I expect that an upcoming makeover by PaperThin.com will have a dramatic positive improvement on overall user experience and site metrics.
Next steps…As with StumbleUpon, visitors to the new Cool Site of the Day should have the experience of viewing sites (plus videos, apps, images, etc.) based on their interests. This feature set will largely be dictated on whether or not I raise capital in order to higher engineers who can steer the site in that direction.
Perhaps the biggest change for Cool Site of the Day will come from an infrastructure standpoint; the site is moving away from the WordPress blogging platform to the very robust CommonSpot CMS platform created by Boston-based PaperThin.com. We still have time to figure out how to integrate both but in the meantime, take a look at some of the mock-ups and let me know your thoughts:
http://www.coolsiteoftheday.com/2012/08/redesign/
Thanks!
Mike
