Even if you’re not selling something directly, these may help you. It’s related to a few comments I’ve gotten about this post.

1. Sites that load faster get higher search engine rankings.
   There are a few things you can do to improve load time. Specifically:
   • If you don’t need PNG’s transparency, use a JPEG.
   • If you want to produce retina graphics without significant pain, save a double-size image at a low JPEG quality. Usually a 30% quality JPEG is smaller than a high-quality JPEG or PNG that’s half the resolution.
   • Use a WordPress (or whatever) theme that is optimized for load time. For WordPress, that’s StudioPress’s Genesis, which was developed by CopyBlogger. The entire point of their themes is to provide a quick-loading site highly optimized for making Google ad revenue.
2. Don’t bother with a slider. Or, if you do, it shouldn’t take up most of the vertical part of the front page. Notice that Amazon’s doesn’t. I was going to praise Creative Market’s use of sliders in categories—only to discover that they’d eliminated them.
   Why not bother? Because anything that takes more time to load, as sliders typically do, means that the most important part of your page is blank while the client’s browser is waiting for the information to render it.
   You may have a great internet connection, but you can’t expect everyone looking at your page to.

3. Put the most important items above the fold because people will spend four times more time above the fold. Not all people are willing to scroll, especially if the page takes time.
   If you’re a publisher, new titles, preferably all the newest titles, should go above the fold. If you can’t make that work, put the titles you expect to be bigger first.

4. When adding colors to your site, remember that some people are colorblind, and not just in the ways you expect. Take a snapshot of your site and desaturate it. Can you still see the differences?

5. Aging eyes need higher contrast. Is your content sufficiently high enough in contrast to be read by them? Also, reduce contrast for less essential elements (I de-emphasize meta information about a post such as categories, tags, and date and time.)

6. There is a sharp divide between the links should be underlined people and the underlining makes links less readable people. I’ve previously used underlines (or a dotted border) on hover, but I’m a no-underline person. Just: be consistent, whatever you pick. These days, you could use a much less intrusive method like:

   a:hover { border-bottom: 1px thin dotted #bbb;
     border-bottom: 1px thin dotted rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.25);}

If You’re an Author, What’s Your Number One Design Goal?

I’ll let Tim Grahl of Out:think Group take this one.

Your #1 goal in building out your website, and in everything you do to market your books online, is to grow your email list.

Here’s Tim’s post about building an author site in an hour.
(Yes, really, I’ve done it in an hour.)

People Spend More Time on the Left than on the Right of Your Page

This assumes left-to-right reading, so those of you with Hebrew or Arabic pages should reverse this.
For this reason, I personally dislike putting sidebars on the left.
However, if you’re going to put a sidebar on the left, then at the top is where your email signup form should go.

People Read in an F shape

Mostly headlines, spending less time on content.
So, use headlines in your posts. If you enable Markdown on your WordPress site (it’s a Jetpack plugin feature, and you absolutely should be using Jetpack): ## at the beginning of a line is an h2, ### is an h3. Easy peasy.
(I published this post accidentally, so I guess I’m done. Anyone want to read up on how SEO-optimized sites, making $ off Google ads, work theory-wise? I find it fascinating, even if it’s not my cuppa to produce them.)