I keep a note of the changes I want to make on my homepages and then do them once I have gathered enough.

Last time I changed things around here on cleverwp.com was in the beginning of September. A month after several interesting things have happened, a 457% newsletter subscription rate for example!

Let’s start by taking a look at what I did…

Prettified Newsletter Signup Field

Prettified Newsletter Signup

My newsletter signup was hastily thrown together a long time ago, and I finally got around to updating the design. I changed the default text and the default CSS and I added an image on top as an attention getter.

The text promotes the free gift that all new subscribers currently get; a free list of PHPDugg, Pligg og Scuttle social bookmarking sites.

The chosen layout and color-usage was a compromise of drawing attention/focus to the sign up fields, without being too intrusive.

Newsletter Booster

I took the opportunity to install my own Premium WordPress Plugin, Newsletters Booster as part of my update.

Newsletter Booster in action

*Self Promotion Starts* Newsletter Booster makes it dead-easy to sign up to a newsletter just with a check box! (See the video introduction.)

When visitors are leaving a comment on a WordPress blog they enter their name, e-mail and URL anyway, so Newsletter Booster adds an extra check-box to the comment form, so all they have to do is check a check-box to sign up for my newsletter!

I have experienced not only more sign-ups to my newsletter (read a section further down for more details) but also more comments.

Since Newsletter Booster is able to integrate to almost any 3rd party mailing manager every commenter that signs up to my newsletter is automatically sent to MailChimp which I use to manage my newsletter.

*Self Promotion Over*

As you can see the layout and color scheme is identical to the rest of the site, I intend to make better use of the space I have next to the image in the future.

Optimized Title Section

Facebook Share and Like

The section that contains the title of the individual pages on this blog have had a beautification, and I’ve added Facebook Share and Facebook Like just underneath the title.

This has given a better exposure on Facebook and I have noticed an increase in traffic from Facebook as well, in fact an increase of 94% in traffic referred from Facebook!

I also spiffed up the area around the post title visually, introducing a white background amongst other things.

Facebook Like Box

Facebook Like Box

The Like Box in the sidebar is a social plugin from Facebook, and works via an iframe as well.

The content of iframes loads separately from the actual page, and that means cleverwp.com loads faster, while still keeping functionality for the visitors.

Before I used a WordPress plugin to have the like box, and by removing the plugin I decreased the loading-time for the visitors.

Speaking of speed…

Various changes

• The Facebook Share (beneath the title on posts and pages) is unfortunately only available via JavaScript, but the Facebook Like integration is via an iframe, so the loading speed is improved compared to using a JavaScript solution for both.
• “The Ghost of Facebook Commenting” – A while back I tried a brief integration with Facebook Commenting, but I never got it to work as I really wanted, and is for now a failed project. While I disabled the integration a few months back, I forgot to remove the JavaScript code I had added in the footer. Doh!
• I made some visual changes to streamline the design. This site currently runs on the Thesis WordPress Theme, but has been heavily customized via custom functions and CSS styling.

457% More Newsletter Subscribers!

Yes. An improved visual style combined with the Newsletter Booster plugin gave a 457% boost in sign-ups for the newsletter in September (compared to the average number of monthly sign-ups since the beginning of the list.)