Chances are that if you’re running a public facing blog, you’re probably happiest when someone actually reads it. Preferably lots of someones. Your blog’s stats can give you some great ways to get to know a little bit more about your readers, and what it is about your work that most attracts them.

While the more liberal artsy types among us might shoo off the idea of obsessively stat trawling as something for the more scientifically inclined, there’s actually something for everyone lurking just beneath the surface, whether that’s inspiration or cold, hard logic. If you want people to read your blog, making use of your stats can give you an arsenal of information to help make that happen. In our Stats Wrangling series, we’ll be digging in to how to get to grips with your blog stats, one module at a time. But in today’s post, we’ll start with a whirlwind tour of the whole works.

The Fifty Mile View

The first thing you’ll want to do is to head to the Stats tab of WordPress.com, once you’ve logged in. That’s going to take you to the fifty mile view, the big picture, of what’s happening on your blog right now, in terms of the people visiting and reading it.

From up on high you can get a nice overview of what’s currently “trending”, or most of interest to the people visiting your blog. And that can give you some ideas in and of itself. But to get right down to business, you’ll want to dig into the different sections of your stats, and click through the “summary” sections, where a lot more information lurks.

Days, Weeks, & Months

Let’s start with Days, Weeks, & Months. By default, you’ll be able to see which days have been most popular in terms of visits to your blog. Clicking through to the “Weeks”, “Months”, or “Summaries” sections give you some different ways to see how things are going on a bigger scale. As you click through those, ask yourself a couple of questions:

• Are certain days of the week more popular than others? Could it be that publishing on Mondays, for instance, is a bad idea, when every time you publish on a Friday, your stats seem to soar much higher?
• Are there certain weeks of the year when traffic either nose dives or picks up considerably? Does that correspond to your summery fruit punch recipé, or your beautiful photos of an Icelandic Santa’s Grotto? How could you create more content to chime in with these seasonal spikes, or avoid seasonal fall off by focusing your attention elsewhere?

Top Posts & Pages

Digging into your Top Posts and Pages gives you a very clear idea of your most popular content. Which is a great way of getting ideas as to the type of content browsers and visitors are most interested in reading. Consider:

• Where are people consistently heading when they arrive at your blog?
• Whether you’re making the best of those posts and pages, or if they could use a spring clean?

Referrers

Checking out your list of referrers will give you a better idea of how people found your blog in the first place. For a lot of people, that will have been through search engines, but you’re likely to see all sorts of referrers in the mix. Ask yourself:

• Where are people coming from to find you?
• Is there anything you can do to make it even easier for those people to find you in future?

Search Engine Terms

This one follows directly on from your top referrers. If people are finding your blog by searching for something, what is that they were looking for, and how does that chime in with the post they ended up finding on your blog? Ask yourself:

• What are people searching for when they stumble on your blog?
• Can you do a better job of helping them find what they’re looking for, by using clearer wording, or building on that most popular content with more posts, or even a page?

Tags & Categories

Tags, and to a degree, categories are really important, especially in the WordPress.com community, where folks might very well find and follow you in the Reader based solely on how you’ve tagged your posts. If you aren’t tagging your posts, it’s a bit like opening a restaurant at the end of a dusty dirt road and not putting up a sign to show people where it is. Looking at your Tags & Categories stats, consider:

• Are you tagging your posts consistently? And putting them into categories that make instant sense to someone browsing your site for the first time?
• Which tags and categories are consistently hot to trot? Can you write more in that category to keep people coming back for more?

Shares

How (and if) people are sharing your posts with their friends and online contacts can also be interesting in terms of seeing where you could possibly spend more of your attention. Consider:

• Where are people, if they are, sharing your work? Facebook? Twitter? Elsewhere?
• How could you make it easier for them to do that? Have you, for instance, linked your blog up to your Facebook or Twitter accounts?

Top Commenters

If someone’s taken the time to comment on your blog, they’re well worth learning more about. Taking a look at this section of your stats, consider:

• Who comments most on your blog?
• Have you visited their blog or commented on their posts?

Clicks

While we’ve been mostly interested in how people have arrived at your blog so far, it’s also worth considering how they’re leaving it. The Clicks section of your stats is useful for learning all about that. Taking a look through this section, ask yourself:

• Where are you sending people once they leave your blog?
• Do you see any relationship between your posts and the places they’re headed?

Best Ever

One way to create success for a post is to see what’s worked before (see: every film ever made in Hollywood). Clicking on the Best Ever link just under the main stats graph, ask yourself, as you browse the results:

• What was the best ever day for your blog?
• Looking at all of the stats we’ve discussed above, specifically for this day, what picture do you have about what made that day successful for your blog?

Over to You

I hope this quick overview of your stats gives you some ideas about how you can make better use of them to make your posts even better. Remember, it’s not about changing who you are, or what you write, to serve some magical formula, but just a way to get a better handle on what’s working, and what’s not working so well, on your blog. Having an idea about what makes your readers tick, can, if you’re interested in having more of them, be really useful when you’re next thinking up a blog post. Stats shouldn’t be restrictive or prescriptive, but rather another source of inspiration for where to take your blog next.

How have your stats made a difference to your blogging?

Image based on “Madrid-Stock market, Spain (2012) by Alberto Carrasco Casado, CC-BY-2.0.

The dashboard’s new design features Open Sans — the free, open source typeface by Steve Matteson offers a pleasing reading experience.

Back in April, I shared our goals for the WordPress.com dashboard redesign:

• It should have a simple, uncluttered design; free of excessive decoration and focused on your content.
• It should use webfonts for beautiful, legible typography that’s consistent in every browser.
• It should have a responsive design that’s tailored to desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones.
• It should do all this while retaining the familiar, user-tested dashboard interface that millions of users already understand.

We’ve redrawn all the icons, we’ve opened up spacing, we’ve moved to Open Sans as our default typeface, and we’ve increased contrast to make the dashboard as beautiful on the inside as your blog is on the outside:

Beautiful new icons and stronger contrast are two elements of the dashboard’s redesign.

Opt in to responsive goodness

We’re also hard at work on a responsive design, so you can view and work in your WordPress.com dashboard on your smartphone or tablet. It will be available for everyone later this year, but you can preview it today. To enable the responsive dashboard, go to Users → Personal Settings and click the checkbox next to: Enable experimental responsive design (MP6). If you’ve previously opted in to our design preview, you’ll have this enabled by default.

The responsive dashboard is tailored for smartphones and tablets.

We hope the redesign makes creating things with WordPress even more enjoyable.

Special thanks to the early adopters who took the new dashboard design for a spin and took the time to share their feedback — your thoughts and ideas were a big help as we iterated on the design and fixed bugs.

DorkDaddy.com

What’s the point of having kids if you can’t raise them into die-hard Star Wars fans? DorkDaddy — dentist by day, geek by night, dad 24/7 — uses his blog to chronicle life with this three geeks-in-training.

You respond to his combination of candid takes on parenting with analysis of key issues (would Superman would be a better father than Batman?), and so do we. From whipping up Butterbeer for a sick dorkling to LEGO extravaganzas to building homemade hovercrafts, he takes us through the richness of parenthood with grace, humor, and, yes, a substantial measure of unabashed dorkiness. (We also love his frequent odes to the DorkMommy.)

The Urban Daddy

We’re clearly not the only fans of The Urban Daddy’s mix of “parenting, politics, and common sense” — you made him a finalist in both the Best Canadian Weblog and Best Family or Parenting Weblog categories of this year’s Bloggie Awards. Less a traditional “DaddyBlog” than a blog about life by someone who happens to be a dad, we appreciate the mix of hockey, health, political, and other news (professional wrestling, anyone?) — all served with a side of dad-perspective and cute kid stories.

Dadgitated

What happens when a “real man’s man” becomes a stay-at-home-dad? He gets a little dadgitated.

I fish, I hunt, I can shoe a horse, run a boat, change a tire on an eighteen wheeler, hold my booze, make moonshine, butcher livestock, lift heavy objects, use a smoker in a proper manner, chop wood and I’m pretty sure I could survive the up-coming zombie apocalypse. I’ve worked heavy construction. I’ve worked on the deck of big boats. I’ve fought with 2,000 lbs draft horses and won.

Now I’m a stay-at-home father… and I think it will be the end of me.

One of the wonderful things about blogs is how they connect us to people with similar experiences and passions; reading other bloggers’ perspectives can validate and enrich our own. Honest writing about parenthood on Dadgitated (how do you explain what a vagina is to your four-year old?) creates a space where parents can see and laugh at themselves — giving us the breathing room we need to be better parents.

Here are some other community favorites for your Father’s Day reading pleasure:

• Along with Urban Daddy, there’s The Urban Daddy (we’ll let them fight that one out).
• Snoozing on the Sofa follows older dad Scott as he navigates marriage and fatherhood, and learns that he can no longer have nice things.
• UK-based Whiskey for Aftershave hits the dad trifecta — an older, stay-at-home dad of twins.
• Touchline Dad is a sports lover raising three sporty children, and learning how to be a perfectly supportive sideline dad.
• Twinfamy’s name says it all — one dad raising the “two greatest children to ever walk the earth, aside, of course, from Jesus Christ and Chuck Norris.”
• The Dorky Daddy has no delusions of being “the cool dad,” and he’s not ashamed.

Do you have a favorite WordPress.com dad? Let us know!

Lines

No serum

can replace the living

drawn in these lines -

this is no paint-by-number

out of a box,

but an original,

a hand-drawn facsimile

We take great pains to project a perfect image of ourselves with our words, our clothes, and our manners, often forgetting that the cracks — big or small — in our facades reveal just as much about our true selves. In “Lines,” a poem of few words and great insight, Melody calls on us to accept our blemishes and our wrinkles, both real and figurative. More than mere acceptance, her poem invites us to celebrate these imperfections, on and beyond our skin, as the cherished traces of a life fully experienced.

Fear and Trembling at the School Talent Show

“You have to do the show,” I told him. I stood and went to get my own coat. “You have to do it, or you’ll feel worse than you do right now. You’ll feel regret. You committed to this, and you need to follow through on the commitment, even though you’re scared.”

I felt shaky saying this to him. It was either a great moment in parenting, or the worst; I wasn’t sure.

Our hearts beat considerably faster as we follow the protagonists of “Fear and Trembling at the School Talent Show,” a young boy having last-minute second thoughts about going on stage, and his mother, the blog’s author, who sees her own anxieties reflected and refracted in her son’s trepidation. It is a rich, patient portrait of the emotional turmoils of writing and of parenting, demonstrating the great narrative potential of longer blog posts (which are easy to mark and to find with our recently launched WPLongform tag). We leave this piece with a more nuanced understanding of the tension, intrinsic to all creative activity, between the fear of flopping miserably and the desire to reach — and touch — an audience.

On “Geek” Versus “Nerd”

Geeks are fans, and fans collect stuff; nerds are practitioners, and practitioners play with ideas.

I may be a science nerd, but I’m probably a music geek….

Mixing subtle cultural commentary (for the sociology nerds) with some nifty data mining (for the chart geeks), “On “Geek” Versus “Nerd”“ is a post that both entertains and enlightens us. It forces us to reconsider terms we use on a daily basis, but whose deeper connotations we often fail to notice. The lively discussion it generated hardly comes as a surprise: as bloggers and as readers, we find ourselves constantly debating our interests, our allegiances, and our affiliations. Thanks to this piece, we can continue these debates with a clearer understanding of the passions that drive us; we will become nerdier, geekier, and, surely, better for it.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

Step away yet stay connected

With the new streamlined Notifications view, you can step away from your computer but still stay connected to your readers. With just a few taps you can:

• Read comment threads and reply.
• Moderate new pending comments.
• Get stats highlights.
• See your new followers and follow them back.
• See who liked your posts.

Don’t need so many notifications? You can turn off specific notification types (for example “Likes”) in the Settings panel. You can also mute entire blogs if it gets too noisy.

See what’s going on with your blog quickly.

Reply to comments with ease.

Additional improvements and bug fixes

We also added a few more nifty features in this release:

• A new menu icon has been added that matches up with the latest ‘Holo’ design guidelines.
• Settings and Sign out options have been added to the overflow menu for easier access.
• New fonts added for easier readability.
• … and many more small bug fixes and reliability improvements.

What’s next?

We’ve got some great new features in the works including improvements to Media, Account Setup, and the Reader.

How do you like the new Notifications? Drop a comment here to let us know!

Front Page Template Example

Forefront is a business and corporate theme designed by one of our own, Takashi Irie. The theme is packed with nifty features such as custom page templates, testimonials, social links, and flexible widget areas. With those features, Forefront helps you to create a strong–yet beautiful–online presence for your business.

Forefront is a premium upgrade for your blog. Read more about Forefront on the Theme Showcase, or test drive it for yourself by going to Appearance → Themes in your Dashboard.

Sounds inspiring, doesn’t it? If you’re not attending, you should know you can always get your dose of TED on the TED Blog, a WordPress.com VIP site. But we should warn you: there’s so much to discover on the TED Blog — it may just overload your brain.

Since many of you are out there writing, creating, and finding ways to share your own ideas with the world, we think that’s a good thing.

Here’s a sampling of what you’ll find on the TED Blog:

• Featured topics on the home page, such as the latest stories on business.
• Resourceful roundups of popular TEDTalks, like this list of the 20 most-watched TED talks to date, and highlighted playlists that curate content on your favorite topics — for space enthusiasts, consider these out-of-this-world talks from astronauts (including Chris Hadfield).
• Featured stories and interviews with thinkers who’ve given recent TEDTalks, like a discussion on behavioral economics and energy with Alex Laskey and Sendhil Mullainathan or further reading on global issues from Anas Aremeyaw Anas, the undercover journalist who has brought many criminals to justice in Ghana.
• A topics archive that’s worth a peek, on everything from design to health to education.

It’s a blog for the curious, knowledge-hungry, and forward-thinking reader. Dive in — you’ll see.

For those of you interested in learning more about the speakers at TEDGlobal 2013, check out TED’s recommended reads: books, articles, and research papers to introduce you to the thinkers taking the TED stage, including the work of Pico Iyer, Jihad vs. McWorld author Benjamin Barber, provocative writers like the Atlantic‘s Anne-Marie Slaughter, and leading scientists and researchers.

If you’re interested in watching the conference live, check out the TED Live membership.

This week, three standout posts gave us both:

What is Happening in Istanbul?

Hundreds and thousands of citizens from all walks of life then joined them to support for the protestors. Couple of more thousand passed the Bosporus Bridge on foot to support the people of Taksim. They were met with more water cannons and more pepper spray, more hostility. Four people died, thousands of people were injured.

No newspaper or TV channel was there to report the events. They were busy with broadcasting news about Miss Turkey and “the strangest cat in the world.”

Blogger Defne Suman lives in Istanbul, where protestors began taking to the streets in late May in opposition to the planned demolition of a city park to make way for a shopping mall. As protests intensified, the police reaction kept pace — but media coverage did not. Frustrated by what seemed to be a media blackout, Defne turned to her blog and published an honest, unsparing account of her city’s turmoil.

The world, eager for news, didn’t take long to pick up on it: What is Happening in Istanbul?  has been viewed over 2.5 million times and has 2100 comments. Bloggers around the world translated it into other languages, and it spread like wildfire across social networks like Facebook. Defne’s post is a testament to the power of blogs to democratize publishing and make information accessible.

Do I Look Like a Baby Killer?

On Fieldwork in Stilettos, Kat Richter shared the story behind her decision to become an escort at Planned Parenthood after coming face to face with a protestor during a visit for routine health needs:

“Please take one of these,” he begs.  He looks so old.  So unhappy.  So sad and in pain and I wonder if he should even be out here on the sidewalk.  I’m sure he feels like he is doing God’s work and although he isn’t rude or abusive like some of the protestors I’ve seen on TV, he’s laid a sign down on the sidewalk that says, “They kill babies here.”

“No thank you,” I tell him.  And then, because I have an embarrassing habit of being polite to people even when they’re pissing me off, I add, “Have a nice afternoon.”

For a moment, I consider asking him to join me for a cup of coffee at the café just next door.  After all, good Quakers don’t try to talk sense into people; they listen.

But I’m not quite good enough.

With a provocative title and discussion on abortion rights, Do I Look Like a Baby Killer? readers might have expected an angry and one-sided diatribe. Instead, Kat tried to understand the protestor’s motivation, took a hard look at her own fears, and wrote a personal, insightful post that opened the door to conversation. What could have been a vitriolic rant became an opportunity for debate — which readers did, with vigor — on a deeply divisive issue.

What Al-Qaeda Taught Me About the Frailty of Loyalty

Extra guards we had stationed in the Black Room would then noisily shuffle off, creating the illusion of cooperating detainees. The words and sounds exploited their worst fears. Within seconds, hands would go up (if they hadn’t initially). Paranoia soared as the sound of more exiting detainees echoed throughout the room.

Chris Simmons, the blogger behind Human Chess, is a veteran of the Balkan, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars and former Army Interrogator. In What Al-Qaeda Taught Me About the Frailty of Loyalty, he walks readers through one of his most successful interrogation techniques, the “Prisoner’s Dilemma.” (Note: while the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a physically non-violent technique, some may still find this a challenging read.)

Chris’ unflinching narrative paints a clear picture of the interrogation room. This candid, difficult description informs debates about interrogation techniques by giving us the kind of detail that was previously inaccessible.

If you’d like a more lighthearted read for your Friday afternoon, here are a few more Freshly Pressed posts that got us laughing and thinking:

• On “Geek” Versus “Nerd”: a Twitter-based statistical analysis breaking down the geek/nerd distinction.
• 9 Photos for 9 Years: photographer Diane Parsons celebrates her daughter’s 9th birthday by photographing her as nine strong women throughout history.
• But What is it That I Want?: musings on growing up, in rhythmic, staccato verse.
• Comparing Oranges to Cookies: lessons about grace and thankfulness from a stuffed monkey named Joe-Joe.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

Trvl is a tumblelog theme that’s all about blogging. With a beautiful and simple design by Danny Cohen, Trvl puts your posts front and center. Literally.

It supports a variety of post formats to mix up the appearance of your blog posts in a nifty way. Add spice with a custom header image, widgets, and a footer navigation menu.

Find out more about how to get started with Trvl on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your blog by going to Appearance -> Themes.

Sue Schlabach warmly opens the door to her online home, 129 Twig & Vine: a stylish, vintage-inspired blog on art and life in central Vermont. She has completely transformed Koi, the playful orange theme you can’t miss in our Theme Showcase. Here is Koi’s out-of-the-box look next to Sue’s site:

Sue, an artist living on a hillside in a rural area, evokes the artisan lifestyle with 129 Twig & Vine‘s paper craft-inspired look and antique touches. She liked the foundation of Koi, but wanted a personalized design that wouldn’t be confused with any other blog. So, she stripped it down, then customized different elements.

A bold, elegant header

Her bold custom header immediately creates a certain mood — the slightly weathered background and decorative font resemble the sign decor for a cozy and rustic place. “I created the green header in Photoshop, with influences from mossy garden signs in French and English gardens,” says Sue.

You can upload your own custom header by going to Appearance » Header in your dashboard. (Remember that each theme is different; if you don’t see this option, your theme doesn’t support the feature. If you’re curious, this list of themes support the use of a custom header.)

A creative and crafty background

Sue’s background is simple and white, but with a crafty twist: at the top, she displays a collage of snipped paper, composed of French letters and documents she bought in France. To start, she scanned the collage, then added the dotted background between the paper strips to customize the look even more. Effectively nostalgic, the bits of paper transport you to a place of slower pace, or even the Victorian past.

You can upload a free custom background image like Sue — head into your dashboard and go to Appearance » Background. (We’ve talked about custom backgrounds over at the Daily Post, in case you’re looking for inspiration.)

Vintage-inspired custom widgets

Much of Sue’s artwork and illustration is vintage-influenced. The antiquarian look for her blog is not only a natural choice, but also personal. For example, the old photograph for the About image at the top of her sidebar is from the 1920s: an image of her great aunt Ruth, on guitar, with one of her friends.

“Here, they’re standing outside my grandmother’s childhood home in the Chesapeake region of Virginia. There are several photos from this particular summer day when my great-grandparents brought the velvet living room settee out on the lawn, and friends joined them to play music and sing. For fairly conservative Mennonites, this seemed like a joyous and exuberant thing to do — not in keeping for the reputation of Mennonites from that time. I like being the descendant of people who would do something like this. My life is centered on living outside in Vermont, during the months that allow it. I have a deep affection for this photograph.”

The other vintage bits in Sue’s sidebar are taken from old postcards, advertisements, labels, and letterpress posters. She likes to use letters from old printing whenever possible, and digitally cuts and rearranges letters to make new words.

Another custom image widget, shown on the right, acts as an “email me” button. You can do the same: in the image widget’s settings, be sure to fill in all the fields, especially the “image URL,” which specifies the location of the image, which you’ll have uploaded to your Media Library.

You must also fill in the “Link URL” field at the bottom — “mailto:” followed by your email address, to ensure messages from your readers will be sent to you.

For more on custom image widgets, see this tutorial in our Widgets series.

Scrapbook-like photographs

If you look closely at the images displayed on Sue’s posts and pages, you’ll notice the corner details of the frames, as if her images are film photographs tucked into scrapbook pages.

Sue made a variety of photo templates in Photoshop for the single images and image montages on her site, which she admits were a little complicated early on.

“I simplified these photo templates and removed a graph paper border that I’d used for the first two years. Each template has a layer mask with the four corners cut off. I paste my photos into the mask, and have layers above that with the cut marks. Under the photo is a shadow in the shape of the mask, but warped slightly on each in the way a natural shadow looks under a photo that’s laying on the table.”

For the oval labels that you see at the corner of images, Sue remodeled a label she’d bought at Vanves Flea Market in Paris, France. “I loved the label edge — it made me think of Bloomsbury artists’ work from the turn-of-the-century. A visit to a Bloomsbury house was influential in kick-starting my creative endeavors,” says Sue.

(If you’re interested in dabbling in Photoshop, you can find resources online, including Adobe’s tutorials. Sue recommends the Photoshop tutorials at Pugly Pixel.)

Further customization with the Custom Design upgrade

With the Custom Design upgrade, you can further tweak color, font, and CSS. Sue’s color palette is simple but effective — the green is bold and prominent. “I love just about every shade of green that exists, so I knew that green would be part of my design. I splashed it everywhere at first: headings, widgets, and the background,” she says.

Eventually, she went with a minimal approach, and now, the green is focused on the header, the dates of the posts, and the sidebar’s widget titles. Her font colors are a mix of brown and green: “I love the two shades together: garden soil and lush leaves.”

In addition, Sue got CSS help from her husband. ”He patiently helped me to strip out Koi’s default background, change the fonts and colors of the headings, and adjust the column width for the posts and the sidebar.” To see what you can and can’t do on your own blog, take a peek at the custom CSS support page.

]]> http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/customizing-koi/feed/ 12 Before-After Koi CL Before-After Koi Header custom background About widget Email link Link URL Image oval label