Cutline Thus Far: Part 2
My last post on what switching to the Cutline theme framework (of course still modified like crazy in the back end and my own design) was a little sparse as I had only been seeing the immediate effects. Now it’s been a while longer and I can make some more observations on to what the new theme has done for me.
Background
The last version of this site was based on the K2 theme for WordPress. I liked K2 for it’s feature heavy, AJAX heavy and user oriented approach. Unfortunately K2 is a relatively heavy piece of work and performance was reflecting that, and I saw the future here as a more simple and straight forward. Enter the Cutline theme. Built for SEO by Chris Pearson, I figured this was the next step I needed to improve my blog entirely in every aspect. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far:
RSS Subscribers
Before the reboot (this also participated in both CSS and Standards reboot(s)) I was around low 30’s in terms of readers via RSS. It would fluctuate a little between 25 and 35. I was writing twice a day for about a week and it was still around there. At the time of writing this, it’s at 50, with a rolling week average of 41. That’s a huge improvement and is really motivating me to get me to write when I know there’s an increasing amount of people reading.
The 50 came up from a natural (normal traffic day) 45 and after the reboot traffic was coming in, but with a little increase of only 5 I don’t see it being a ’spike’. 100 I would consider a spike, but a couple more is just growth to me!
Traffic
I don’t know about this, but it’s gotten more consistent if anything. I was using the eXtreme tracker (or something like that) before and I think it counts a little more than what’s real. Now with Mint I get 45-55 a day consistently, and with the reboots it’s been around 100/day. Pageviews/visits are also going up, with each visitor viewing an average of 3-4 pages, which I’m pretty sure is high.
Alexa ranking has improved as well, and I know it doesn’t prove much but it does show trends. I get 78% or so FireFox traffic so my Alexa rank will never be very high 
Comments
With the addition of the Top Commentators plugin, comments have seen a huge increase. People are starting and participating in discussions not only because they’re really cool, but they like the free PR5 backlink. Nofollow isn’t on this plugin too, so for those of you that participate, enjoy.
Another stat I like to look at is the comments/post number. It used to be around 2.4 or so, but really only because of one post that had 40 comments. Now its up to around 3.2 (297/94) which is a huge increase considering the rate I post at (7-10 a week or so).
Speed
The new framework in Cutline is soo much lighter than K2. The loadtimes would be way below 1 second if I removed the Digg RSS feed, and they used to be around 2 seconds with K2.
Not much to say here besides lighter theme equals faster loading. It’s like putting a boat in the water… it will float
SEO
Traffic from search engines has definitely picked up. After a huge feud with Blogger for the #1 spot on Google for “Connor Wilson” I’m on top again, and likely will be for a long time now. The profile page that was beating me out saw a PR decrease, so all is good there.
I’m also getting a lot of googd Blogsearch terms from google. For example, the post I made a while ago about Ruby on Rails recources got some hits for ‘ruby on rails’ which is a pretty active term I would imagine.
SEO is more of a long term thing, so the effects will be noticed over a long term period of time.
Other
Some other little things, like the sidebar being more complete, and the text being a lot more readable. Also, I switched from a Verdana in copy and Trebuchet MS in heading typography scheme to Arial in copy and Arial Narrow in headings. Who know that Arial Narrow was a CSS font? Well, now you do. 
So, all this from a new design based off someone else WordPress theme?! Yeah, go download it, here. Unless you don’t like improving, growth, better speeds, etc…
Leave a comment
Razor
May 2nd, 2007 at 5:47 PM
“I’m also getting a lot of googd Blogsearch terms from google. For example, the post I made a while ago about Ruby on Rails”
a spelling mistake under the seo heading
nice work on gettin connor wilson on 1st place on google. i just checked and it works for me!
webee
May 3rd, 2007 at 4:19 AM
i’ve also had increased comments after the instalation of top commenters… and come to think of it… think i have readers that hunt the top. but that is the idea so all is ok.
how can you measure the page loading time?
what do you mean by “Blogsearch terms from google”?
thanks,
webee
[is a design blog]
Steve Wordpressguy
May 3rd, 2007 at 8:45 AM
How has your stability been since the shift? I love the trimmed down look of your current theme, cutline has that great combination of stability and easy customisation.
Connor Wilson
May 3rd, 2007 at 2:22 PM
Stability, as in consistency has been great. I know pretty well what my stats will be the next day, unless there’s going to be extra stuff from CSS Reboot or something.
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