Welcome, Home (Page)

If you are not on the Home Page right now, you can click here to see it. As usual, it’s a work-in-progress, which will now gradually evolve.

Nevertheless it was a needed change for several reasons:

1. A fair percentage of visitors come directly to the home page (about 20%) and, instead of encountering a page that enables visitors to browse through the site, they encounter nothing more than the latest posting.
2. For a year, the site has suffered from severely weak navigation capability. That is in the process of being fixed. Now it has such capability in abundance – and more will be added in time.
3. I always intended this site to use advertising to support its operation, but so far no thought has been given to this strand of activity. I have now stopped animated flash adverts completely because they are annoying and I’ll move forward with text adverts , but not necessarily just from Google.
4. In order to sell adverts you have to have an advertising engine and I’m in the process of creating one – not just for this site, but for the two other sites I’m in the process of building. I therefore need to test out some advertising theories I have and I need a home page in order to do that.
5. As a simple matter of traffic, those who come to the home page are likely to go to at least one other page. The home page is designed for that. Their having a landing page will raise the number of page loads per day (currently it averages 500).
6. Having a single page layout for the site is boring for the visitor. So to counteract the boredom, I will offer several different ones.

As regards variety, I already had a situation with 13 skins and 17 banner photos, which in practice creates 221 possibilities – that take 221 hours to cycle through. The home page current has 7 top-right page photos (for each skin) coupled with a variety of 30 illustrated posting links, (such as those three in the middle of the page) both of which cycle every hour. So the home page varies on a cycle which repeats every 2730 hours (21 days) if you include the 13 skins. But as I intend to raise the number of illustrated posting links to a few hundred, we will soon arrive at a situation where no-one is likely to see exactly the same page twice, even though the site will always look familiar.