Site changes | Page 6 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

That’s a good point. The search results are what Google indexes from the site, and includes a snapshot of all words on a page. What I need to do is exclude the sidebar and footer from appearing in the results, but I’m not sure how to scope it. The only way I know is to do it on a link-by-link basis, but that’s not practical.

I’ve done a bit of Googling to find out whether it can be done (I’m sure it can) but couldn’t find the answer. If anyone happens to stumble across this page and knows, please let me know.

Comments do get indexed, although more recent ones might not have been picked up by Google’s spider. If you search for the text of a more recent one it should appear in the results page.

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In other site developments, I’ve reworked the design a little, creating a single-column sidebar, adding a random gallery preview, and slimming down the info in the footer. It should mean the site loads slightly faster as there’s less stuff in there. Not having two columns in the sidebar means things like the line-wrap in the random lyrics won’t be an issue.

You won’t see the sidebar in this forum, as it uses a different template, but it’s on the rest of the site.

While I’m here, I’ve added a list of the Most Popular posts to the footer. Can anyone think of a Beatles-related heading for this?

Hmm, not sure about that. I think it wouldn’t be too clear what the list was about. Maybe I’ll leave it as it is.

EDIT: Hamburg provided the answer. Top Ten Club it is.

New feature added to pages: related articles. This is automated, and creates links to the five most relevant pages to the one you’re on. So, if you’re reading about Love Me Do, for example, you should see links to the recording session, release date, PS I Love You etc. Give it a go. The list of links appears below the main article.

It’s an automated service so sometimes it throws out peculiar results. It also appears on every page bar the forum, and probably needn’t be everywhere (eg the Contact and Privacy pages). I’ll see if I can limit it to just appear in certain sections, though that’s a templating issue I don’t have time to get into right now.

The idea here is to keep people browsing the site, and to show how much information there is scattered around. This site has a bounce rate of over 50%, meaning more than half the visitors look at just one page before leaving (often something to do with Two Virgins ). However, this is offset by the fact that on average people spend 4-7 minutes on the site looking at four pages in each visit, suggesting those that do stick around are clearly reading quite a bit. Anything I can do to raise this is probably a good thing.

Apologies for those who aren’t interested in these site change updates. I’m doing them for my own reference as much as anything else, so I have a record of when things were added.

Ooh, that’s interesting. Thanks – I’d not seen those outtakes before. When I get a chance I’ll convert them to smileys. It’s nice to see Ringo do more than frown.

Any more AHDN pics, please post them here.

Yes, I have full stats on how the site’s doing, but I’d prefer not to share them in detail here. Traffic grows month-on-month, though, and pretty much doubled in September (when the remasters came out) and didn’t go down again afterwards. Lately it’s levelled off a little, but hopefully with the Lennon celebrations later in the year they’ll go up even more.

Most visitors come from the US, by far. If you’re interested, here’s the top 10 country breakdown for the last month, according to Google Analytics.

In many ways I’m glad that the percentage of new visitors is so high, as that means the site’s growing. Still, I’d prefer to spend more time making new content than analysing the log files, as that’s the main way visitor numbers will grow.

Not sure about the Russian figures – I seem to get more returning visitors, who are spending a massive amount of time on the site. Either there are a lot of passionate Russians who can’t get enough of The Beatles (in the English language), or they’re something to do with the .ru spam comments I get.