A Gamble

I’m in the midst of a live redesign over at AnimatedBliss.com right now. I have to say, it’s equal parts exciting and terrifying. The exciting part is the new design and content (going wide, new blog, etc). The terrifying part is messing with a format/scheme that’s been working pretty well the last year and several months.

One of the things I knew NOT to change was the underlying structure of the html. This also included how I was using and organizing heading tags, paragraphs, etc. I’ve done rather well in search engine rankings recently and I certainly don’t want to disrupt that trend. On the other hand, I knew that I had to rework the banner ads; so a small change to the html had to be made. That worried me a bit. I’m hoping the change will make the ads more productive (aka, better placement)… but at what cost? Will I lose a few notches in my search engine rankings by tinkering with the html? Will that in turn lead to less clicks on the ad? I honestly don’t know, but so far the stats don’t record any major traffic shifts. And the google ad clicks are right where they were last week before any changes were made.

Does this mean I succeeded? I honestly don’t know… it’s too early to tell at this point. Ultimately (with this redesign), I want to make the site more user friendly and browseable. If that leads to more advertising revenue, cool. I’d love to run the site full-time one day…