Help Me Improve This Site

For all of those Internet sniffing hounds out there, you might already be aware of the fact that I have had an as yet minor affair with that other blogging software, Wordpress. The site I've started putting together, a site that will eventually be integrated into the deus62/livingwithmusic network, is still pretty much hidden away and is basically nothing more than a playground at the moment, but it's the beginning of new things to come. Just head over there and have a look at my "Wordpressed" post, then come back here and, if possible, read this post until the end. I do need your help and even if you only read this site through a feed reader, have it sent to you by mail or whatever other method you use to peruse this site, maybe you could uncloak and leave a comment here - it would be much appreciated!

See, for months now I've been thinking about changing livingwithmusic.com and making it better. That is not an easy task, especially in times of ever-more complex and better sites sprouting up all over the Net.

So, let me structure this one a bit:

Preliminaries:

Ever since I put this site online in late 2005, it has been growing steadily, especially since I joined 9rules and since Google suddenly decided to push many of my posts to its front page of search results, depending on what you are digging around for.

In short, I've reached a point at which I get about 10K of visitors a month (that is a bit more than the 4 readers I had when I started out).

From keeping track of my site statistics I know that a lot of the traffic I receive is Google traffic, coming from people searching for specific pieces of information and - the time spent on my pages as recorded by my statistics software strongly indicates that - they are finding it here. Contrary to many other people maintaining special interest blogs on the Internet, my goal was always to simply provide people looking for more esoteric information in regard to LP/CD storage and more obscure releases and reissues with a place to relatively easily find what they are looking for. That goal - my plan, so to speak - came from my own frustration with trying to find that information in the past. So, one day I just decided that I would try to provide what I was myself looking for. A bit schizophrenic, I admit, but it's working.

Secondly, it has become clear to me that the site is beginning to stagnate a bit visitor-wise, so I need to take the next step to reach more people. I'm not interested in more comments or more regular readers - although that would be nice - but I'd like to streamline things a bit, focus on core topics that people are looking for and altogether also branch out into areas that have potential.

Plans:

The following things are planned for the next version of this site.

a) For starters, livingwithmusic.com will become a Wordpress site.

b) The focus will remain on LP/CD/DVD storage, although versatile and more flexible storage solutions are few and far between. I have the feeling that I have already mostly covered the few solutions that hardcore collectors around the globe are using. Most of the steady traffic I receive comes from people desperately looking for affordable (sometimes more exclusive) storage solutions, especially for LPs, and looking for those on Google often lands people on my page.

c) I get a lot of traffic connected to my longer posts recommending music that perhaps isn't talked about elsewhere, so those recommendations (of which I probably still have thousands), will keep on appearing here.

d) I'm going to start a "Millennium Project" which will force me to listen to each and every one of my many thousands of CDs. Each single release or boxed set will be a separate post, listing all details (recording dates, session info, personnel, venue, engineers, etc.) plus a personal evaluation of the disc. As I am a collector, at the moment I still refuse to get rid of even the worst clunkers I have - and I have many - but maybe this project will help me reduce the size of my collection. Along the way, it will also bring CDs to the front page of my site which are long out-of-print, hard to find, are esoteric or eclectic ... whatever. But, just like with the "Siegel Schwall Band", it will hopefully bring people to my site which are desperately searching for information on those disks that hardly anyone else has discussed at length.

e) I'm going to implement a search function which will "open up" my content beyond forcing people to march through an archive simply spanning many consecutive pages. Perhaps, I will also add a tag cloud, although I'm not a big fan of those at all. They can help in specific cases though, especially if the tags are well-chosen.

f) The front page will have the latest post from each of the three sections ("Collecting", "Storage" and "Millennium Project") and a list of recent posts plus more music-related links and information in the footer.

g) Design-wise, the site will rely on a three-column black on white text area plus a header with links to other sites (my other sites plus a super-huge 9rules logo) and a footer with external links to sites I frequent, am a member of or publish information on.

h) I would like to have some more graphics on my site and perhaps move away from my 3-pics-per-post identity.

What you can do:

Although Mint, my statistics program, has given me tons of accurate and very helpful information as to who visits my site when, for how long and with what degree of success, I need your input to make livingwithmusic.com better.

Please leave a comment here with any suggestion you might have. If you cannot think of anything you yourself would like to see improved, perhaps you could also consider the following questions and give an informed answer that can help me lay out some changes.

I am adamant about the fact that I write this site for myself only, but I will take every suggestion into consideration. If you have any, I will guarantee that they will be seriously considered (any of them) but I cannot promise I will implement them. I'm not that kind of guy. ;)

Here are the few questions, but please also add any other suggestion you might have:

a) I have pretty much decided to widen the pages, going for a width of about 960px in total. Are you OK with that? My stats show that close to 100% of my readers could manage that kind of screen width, but stats can be tricky as they can't tell me how you have set up your browser.

b) I'm thinking of asking some companies to support this site. That means there will be selective advertisements for those products that I have recommended, especially for those companies who have gotten hundreds if not thousands of referrers from me. There will, for the time being, not be any other ads on here, but to be quite honest, I am considering it. I do pay about 40 dollars a month to keep this site up and quick, and I'd like to get that expense covered. Perhaps, donations would also be a viable alternative?

c) I'm considering asking some other people I have gotten to know through my 9rules involvement and my browsing around to contribute their knowledge on certain topics on a more or less regular basis. There are a lot of people out there by far more knowledgeable than me on classical music, hard rock and heavy metal, as well as electronica and other genres, so I'd like to see if I could lure them into contributing here on a monthly or more irregular basis. By the way, if you feel like contributing here, leave a comment or send me a mail. I'd love to hear from you.

d) I'd like to stay narrowly focused, but if there's something else I should cover here, I'd like to hear some suggestions from you.

e) I'd like to link to a whole bunch of sites that complement what I'm doing here. I have so far refrained, but if you have a site that I'm not aware of, a site that has a narrow focus on a genre of music or collecting-related topic, let me know and I might add it to the list.

f) If you can, in any way, help out with coding-up of my new design (finished in March/April of this year) or coming up with a good logo for this site, I'd love to hear from you.

That's it for now. I hope you will leave some input here. After all, you know best what you would like to see here and although I'm not going to promise that everything you will suggest will make it into the next version, I do guarantee that I will carefully study every word you wrote.

I hope to hear from you,

Volkher

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