There are many ways to increase your website’s traffic. This CyberkenBlog post covers a few of those with regard to formatting.

Use blog posts rather than static pages to display your educational material

As much as possible you want to present educational material in blog posts. Blog posts are easy to tag, which makes them more discoverable by Googlers, and blog posts are easy to organize on your site using categories and tags, on-site search tools for keeping your visitors on site.

Use .pdf files sparingly, for printing, not online consumption

If you want to provide printable material to viewers, then it’s good to provide that in .pdf files. Many people do not realize that web pages look different according to the devices they are displayed on, but .pdf pages always look the same and print the same for all users.

smartphone2Adapt your modes of presentation for a diversity of devices

If you want to reach younger people on the internet, a mobile responsive website is a must (that is, one which can be viewed on both large and small screens). Increasingly, younger people are using smart phones exclusively for their internet viewing, partly for convenience but especially for economy, because computers are relatively expensive, and so is broadband service. Many newer WordPress themes are “mobile responsive,” which means that they adapt to various screen sizes, moving content around as necessary. On small screens convenience of viewing trumps aesthetics. Smart phone viewers want their information briefly presented in an easily navigable way. On websites designed for cell phones aesthetic enjoyment of photographs suffers. Photos still have an important purpose, however: to communicate impressions, emotions, and symbolic content quickly. Text on mobile devices is small and hard to read, so you’ll want to edit your Web text for brevity. IMHO, the dominance of phones for internet viewing harms both the fluidity and depth of writing and the aesthetic enjoyment of graphics, but for the moment there’s little we can do about that. When roll-up screens that one can pin on a wall get really good, all this could change quickly. But for now we have to adapt to the dominant technology and get our stories across the best way we can.

— TCDavis

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