Prominence of Blog on New Site

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#1

We spent a not inconsiderable amount of time relaunching our site in the last few months of last year. Overall I am very happy with the result, but there’s still one thing that bugs me about the new site. The prominence of the blog. On the old site a link to it it sat proudly in the top menu of the site. However on the new site, after much deliberation we decided it wasn’t of primary importance to new visitors to the site and now a link to the blog languishes in the footer of the site.

The blog is active, and pretty darn useful to users of our software so I’d really like it to have better visibility. However, rather than just popping up a link to it in our top menu (where I still think it doesn’t belong) I thought I canvas suggestions from here. Here’s our site:

Anyone have any creative suggestions?

#2

Why not under the support menu have a drop down like other menus and you can put it on there.

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#3

Based on the “Don’t make me think” principle, why not under the top menu? I usually look for a blog there when I hit a landing page. I’m not sure why it doesn’t belong there?

I agree it’s buried on the footer but I’d keep it there too.

It’s just a convention I’m used to…

+1 to the suggestion that it could live under the support menu if it gets used for a lot of customer usability questions/answers.

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#4

Not answering the question directly but bear with me…

Why have you got the Buy Clock Time MTS at the top of the website when you’ve got an incredibly large button that catches 90% of my attention? Perhaps more importantly why do these links take me through to two different pages?

If you got rid of the Buy Clock Time MTS at the top of the page you’d have ample space to pop a blog link in there. If the blog is useful to your customers, Google will presume it’s useful too (because it gets a lot of sticky traffic) and so it’s madness not to feature it prominently on your website.

While I’m on what does MTS stand for? Is it an industry specific term? I ask because while it’s in your domain name and timeclock.com is owned by a competitor, you could probably drop MTS rom the copy and improve readability. Totally understand if you’re not allowed to use Time Clock on its own for legal/commercial reasons.

Also while I’d was clicking about I found this issue on http://www.timeclockmts.com/quick-tour-overview/ when the screen was just the right width (not too wide, not too narrow). You might want to check for other instances of this same issue throughout the website.

Hope some of that helps.

TL;DR find a way to put your blog link in at the top of the page, but there are a few other issues on the site that I think are equally important to address :smile:

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#5

I have had the same considerations for my company’s blog. I believe there’s two important considerations.

  1. Content marketing
  2. Customer support

If it were solely used for content marketing than I think a prominent place is less important since the focus is on funneling inbound traffic from search engines etc. However, you noted that the current customer base benefits greatly and for that reason I believe it deserves a prominent spot in your main navigation.

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#6

@craigvn thanks, I’ve done that based on your suggestion and other replies in this thread.

#7

Why have you got the Buy Clock Time MTS at the top of the website when you’ve got an incredibly large button that catches 90% of my attention? Perhaps more importantly why do these links take me through to two different pages?

One takes users to the shop, the other to the trial download page. Trial download buttons are not available on all pages. The shop link is.

If you got rid of the Buy Clock Time MTS at the top of the page you’d have ample space to pop a blog link in there. If the blog is useful to your customers, Google will presume it’s useful too (because it gets a lot of sticky traffic) and so it’s madness not to feature it prominently on your website.

I’ve put it under the support menu for the reasons other posters have mentioned above. I especially like @Lewis reply. The blog is primarily for customer support rather than content marketing so it deserves a link up the top.

While I’m on what does MTS stand for? Is it an industry specific term? I ask because while it’s in your domain name and timeclock.com is owned by a competitor, you could probably drop MTS rom the copy and improve readability. Totally understand if you’re not allowed to use Time Clock on its own for legal/commercial reasons.

MTS is the initials of my original company name (back in 2000). I was using the original name online for about a year before trying to register it here in Australia. They wouldn’t let me (someone else was using it already) so given than my original product was a timesheet system I simply chose “Timesheets MTS Software” as my business name. As I’ve developed other products I just tack the MTS onto the end. Branding I suppose. Pretty crappy branding, but branding all the same. And as to using vanilla “time clock” I saw one of my competitors sued out of existence a few years ago for using the vanilla term “punch clock” to name their product. I don’t want to risk the same.

Thanks for the heads up on the layout issue. Looking at that now. EDIT. Layout issue fixed.