You might notice my top-ranking Vancouver technical writer site looks a little different today. I updated to the WordPress twentysixteen theme. You may recall I gave an enthusiastic shout-out to WordPress last May, when I updated my site to use the twentyfifteen theme. I still think WordPress is awesome, and it would appear that website builders the world over agree with me. As of today’s date (February 6, 2016), 59.1% of websites in the world use WordPress, according to W3Techs.
It was a snap to make the change, taking about 2 hours total to select the theme, install it, create a few graphics in the right size, and make a few minor formatting tweaks. I added my own copyright information to the footer, customized the link font colour, and changed the font size for the tags in the left column. This is an amazing accomplishment (on the part of their coders to make the task so easy), and I am very appreciative of the service that WordPress provides for free to the world computing community.
I made these changes using a combination of the user-friendly WordPress editing platform and direct coding in the .php and .css files.
While I was at it, I took a look at my Google Analytics for the site. I thought it would be fun to compare the stats from the past month to the stats I reported in May 2015:
| Device | May 2015 | Feb 2016 |
|---|---|---|
| Desktop | 918 – 92% | 936 – 89% |
| Mobile Phone | 70 – 7% | 92 – 9% |
| Tablet | 15 – 1% | 26 – 2% |
| Total Visitors | 1,003 | 1,054 |
The table above shows that the percentage of mobile users has increased slightly. Still, the majority of people who searched for a technical writer used their desktop computer, which makes sense. I imagine people would prefer to do this at work, not while lounging on the beach!
| Browser | May 2015 | Feb 2016 |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome | 729 | 702 |
| FireFox | 115 | 127 |
| Safari | 72 | 108 |
| Internet Explorer | 31 | 90 |
| Other | 56 | 27 |
| Total Visitors | 1,003 | 1,054 |
No changes in the browser pecking order either, though the use of Internet Explorer did increase significantly.
I welcome your thoughts on the new site design. Drop me a line!