Content is King… or at least it is according to the 1,490,000 results on Google. (Ignore the bit where four of the links on the front page celebrate the death of the phrase.)

Opinions may change, but numbers don’t lie: my dearth of content in July resulted in a rather significant drop in traffic over the same time period. I have been neither entertaining nor educational and traffic is back to its pre-June levels.

Who Are You Again?

The internet has a very short attention span and an even shorter window of relevance. Things come so fast and so furious now that people are skimming instead of reading. While blogs get a little larger window than tweets or Facebook posts, it’s not that much larger.

It all comes down to how many time people are willing to hit ‘Back’ on their feeds…

While it’s true the internet also never forgets, it’s also very bad at remembering. The internet is a giant junk drawer of stuff and unless folks see the post when it happens, there’s a good chance it will be buried by the time they stop to look.

Hey You!

And even if I do catch that magic window, I don’t have those readers for very long.

Readers stay only as long as it takes to consume the content they are interested in. If they don’t see anything interesting, they’re gone again and that’s almost as bad as not getting them in the first place. Now the next time they see my blog they might not see the changes, they’ll just remember that I didn’t have anything interesting the last time around.

The Quest for the Shiny

So I need new content, new shiny posts for people to devote a few precious seconds of their attention on.

And then I need to find a way to make my old content (all 1,187+ posts) into something just as shiny.

…I think it’s time to redesign the front page again.

*goes off to tinker*