Benefits of Adding Category Menu to Blog Header
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Yesterday, a campaign I had running with crazyegg.com came to an end.
Crazyegg is a tool that allows you to make your blog navigation better by telling you what people are clicking. It has a superb heatmap generation feature. Let me show you a cropped heatmap of just the header section of my blog.
The heatmap shows all the clicks made on the header.
Early readers may remember that 3 weeks back, this blog header just had the title in it. The categories menu was added later on.
Like most blogs, I had my Blog Category menu on the sidebar too. But I decided to move it to the header. And I’m glad I did that. Because:
11.47% of *All* Clicks Made on this Blog were Made on the Header!
Adding the blog category menu to the header has been a stroke of genius. As it helped me increase the “unique visitors : page views” ratio from “1 : 1.72″ to “1 : 2.1″. (Each unique visitor on average reads more than 2 pages on this blog.)
In normal language, readers now visit 15% more pages and spend more time on my blog because the category menu is in the header!
Action Summary:
- Signup for crazyegg.com to evaluate what your blog readers are clicking on.
- If you can, move your blog category menu to your header.
Spread the word:
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I’d really like to my my categorys to the header. Any pointers on how to do this?
Posted 23 Jun 2007 #
Thanks for asking Kevin.
I went and edited the header file in my WordPress column. And added the direct category links under the title.
You could use special WordPress category tags/codes too - but then it comes along with junk categories like “Default” or “Misc” which you wouldn’t want over there. Also, WordPress tags lists the categories in alphabetical order - instead of an intuitive/logical order.
So I chose to edit the header file using a href tags - without using WordPress category tags.
Posted 23 Jun 2007 #
I’m working on a new blog design which will have the main menu under the header. After reading your post, I may just move the navigation above the header and then place the categories under the header. Horizontal navigation saves so much room.
Posted 23 Jun 2007 #
I’ll have to experiment with this now. And as a side note, the links you have posted to crazyegg.com don’t work. They both link to http://www.blogclout.com/blog/wp-admin/11.47%%20of%20*
I cut off the end of the link cause its very long, but thats what they are linking to at the moment, just thought you would like to know.
Posted 23 Jun 2007 #
Thanks Brian for letting me know. Its been fixed now. (I think there was an error because of using % sign in the alt tag…)
Posted 23 Jun 2007 #
duh……thats so simple. I don’t know why I thought it would be complicated. Thanks for the how to!
Posted 24 Jun 2007 #
You’ve gotten me interested in Crazy Egg. I think I might try the service. It looks like I could use it to gather a lot of information on how to better place things like navigation on my blog.
Posted 25 Jun 2007 #
Yes Jared. CrazyEgg is very helpful especially when your blog is new and you are testing a lot of different features and widgets out.
Posted 25 Jun 2007 #