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April 21, 2006

How did you get here? Wait, where are you going?

Friends, I need help with something. How can I make this site easier to use?

I occasionally (okay, more often than is recommended by the FDA) check my StatCounter to see what causes visitors to land on TennesseeTicket.com. The good news: more and more, lately, it's searches like 'election candidates in hamilton county tennessee' or 'tennessee state house candidates'. Candidate names are also big.

The bad news? Way too many times, the visitor lands on the front page and doesn't click through to the page that would answer the query. What does this mean?

I don't mean to brag, but I've done my own searches, and I can't find many better places to peruse 'election candidates in hamilton county tennessee' or 'tennessee state house candidates'. The lack of comprehensive collections like this was the primary impetus for my seeking out a way to publish such a thing.

I know there are other repositories, and we all choose to package data in different ways; but is there something about the layout here that either confuses or repels seekers of electoral knowledge?

It's a volunteer effort, so you get what you pay for; but on the other hand, if the effort is not resulting in the delivery of quality information, something needs to change. Please tell me what that is, and I'll do my best to fix it.

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Site News | By joe lance | 6:27 AM

Comments

I came here through The Rocky Top Brigade RSS feed because your subject line was interesting. If your sidebar showed the titles of recent posts you may be likely to get a reader to click through a little. All I see is "« Never have I ever drunk a Pepsi.. | Main " and that's only if I scroll back to the top. As I read an article I scroll down and as I near the end of the article I look to the sidebar.

Posted by: djuggler at April 21, 2006 9:36 AM

Just wanted you to know that I think you have a great blog operation going here!

Posted by: David Oatney at April 21, 2006 9:44 AM

Thanks, djuggler. Yes, I have been meaning to re-design my individual post page to include at least one sidebar. That may help.

The main thing to which I am trying to draw traffic is on this page, though. It's the horizontal nav bar right below the top banner, that says "..Chattanooga | Hamilton Co | TN House.." etc. Those links are to the candidate listings that are the 'meat' of the site. I'll replicate those links in the sidebar, and maybe they'll get seen.

Posted by: joe public at April 21, 2006 11:05 AM