Blog Customization

Help Wanted

A new color scheme is the first area I would suggest improving. The white background is okay, but the yellow highlighted topics are very distracting and cause eyestrain for the viewer. Choose a text color that contrasts with the background; this is usually best achieved with dark text on a light background. I would choose an orange or a blue background because it invokes excitement. I would implement different shades of the same color as well. This will add a subtle suggestive touch to the page. The page is really busy with all the topics and sub links that are provided. I would suggest adding tabs to help clean up the appearance, and provide a more user friendly navigational experience for users. Tabbed navigation would allow Mr. Drudge to keep a large amount of data in a compact area that is much smaller than what he is currently using. Items such as the site, fact, and thought of the day could be added to a Modal window, or floating window. This is an excellent way to present the additional information that has no space in the page layout.

Adding a blog would add value to the site and could increase the likelihood of potential customer's social bookmarking it and sharing it with their social networks. Blogs can increase the size of the website over time, and this can provide a major SEO benefit in the form of an increase in website authority and a higher number of pages to leverage with internal links. Adding blogs naturally attract search engine traffic and Mr. Drudge, along with refdesh.com, can take advantage of this by not only adding content as often as possible, but to allow visitors to ask questions or leave comments about the site as well.

References

Schneider, G. P. (2011). Electronic Commerce (9th ed.). Boston: Course Technology.