Friday’s task was to integrate a feature to draw traffic to your older content like a widget, related posts, or a “Best of” page.

Adding the feature of including related posts to the blog proved impossible, I have tried a few times, but it would seem that this feature is not possible with the Adelle theme. I’ll see if anything has been written in the forums to see if there is a possible solution to this.

In the meantime the task was a good opportunity to review the site in terms of the overall UX (User Experience). When I started to create the blog, I had in mind some general categories such as beauty, food, home and of course Perfume, but since it would have looked a bit strange to have all the menu items showing with no content, I decided to add the menu items as content grew.

The purpose of defining user experience goes back to some general principles about designing a website, in that you should always have in mind an idea who the website is aimed at and what they would want from it.

In industry terms, a lot has been written about User Centered Design, which is all about making sure that the way the site is designed in terms of its structure, purpose and overall navigation makes it easy for the viewer to find their way around the site and spend time engaging with the content.

Adding features within the navigation, menus and the content itself to encourage the viewer to explore and click-through to additional pages.

I think this was the purpose of Friday’s task, to take a look at the features within WordPress and work out how best to include them in the blog, so that the audience can explore current content as well as older content.

I’ve since made some changes to the menu listing to the right of this blog to see if it will enhance the overall experience for the viewer, for instance, I’ve added the most liked posts as the first item, because it might help the audience to see previous posts that were liked by other bloggers the most.

I’ve added a new post, one which I was going to write earlier in the week, but didn’t get a chance to do this since I got a bit carried away with blog surfing during the week and completing the tasks set in Blogging 201 course. Since this post is about the Rosewater that I purchased a couple of weeks ago now, I have used the opportunity to relate it to the previous post on Rosewater as part of Day 5’s tasks.

The weekend has been busy with a visit to Carshalton’s historic lavender field to pick some lovely fresh lavender with my kids. The fragrance has filled our home with the most beautiful scent, reminiscent of, well a field of lavender in the gentle breeze. Best of all, the haul of lavender will be keeping us busy making all sorts of home-made things, wreathes, beauty treatments, candles, body scrubs, hmmmm which reminds me, I’ve planned a regular feature on Sunday night is spa night, I think I’ve got just the ingredient for tonight to try 🙂

Do let me know if this post was useful, I’d love to hear if you’re blogging whether you’ve made any changes to the features on your site.