Michael Janzen

This past week I finished an update to Basic Simplicity. I also launched a new blog dedicated to the theme to help focus on theme content. I’ll also be writing about my adventures in problogging with an emphasis on avoiding all the deep bullshit you’ll read about making money.

Don’t get me wrong, you can make money blogging, but it seems most of the probloggers are so focused on selling the idea of blogging to schemers that they often sound like schemers themselves with all their ebooks, mentorships, and classes. I have no plans to ‘make money’ writing about blogging; I’ll stick to selling something of real value, tiny house plans. So in other words… what I’ll have to say about blogging will be free.

So if you want a slightly different tone I hope you’ll follow me at BasicSimplicity.com. I also setup a Twitter account specifically for Basic Simplicity theme and blogging tweets @basicsimplicity.

Recently I simplified the look & feel of my busiest blog by installing my new WordPress theme, Basic Simplicity. In the past when I’ve changed themes on Tiny House Design but I’ve never noticed so much noticeable effect in user behavior. The only real difference I’m aware of is that I’ve never used such an uncluttered design before.

Ad revenue has dropped and readership, stickiness, and total page views have increased. It’s too early to be able to provide any meaningful statistics but it seems that by focusing on content and allowing it to take center stage the ads are just getting overlooked.

Normally my knee-jerk reaction would be to move some ads back into the content itself except I like the increasing readership numbers too much so I’ll hold back and watch the trends for a while.

My suspicion is that a clean theme is better for increasing readership and cluttered designs are better for ad revenue. So if you are making a living from blogging be careful about switching to an uncluttered design, but if you’re still in traffic growing mode consider a simple theme.

In a month or two I’ll post some charts after I have some real data to prove of disprove my theory. In the mean time I’ll continue to watch and learn.

Over the last few nights I whipped up a simple administration screen for my free WordPress Theme. Now you can make very quick style changes right in the WordPress user interface; there’s no need to edit the stylesheet. You can also add your Google Analytics code, Google site verification code, and custom CSS.

• Go Get Basic Simplicity

These will be the last few edits for a while; I think I have it working well enough to start using basic simplicity on all my blogs. I have a few more features I’d like to add but I’ll hold off and give this version a careful test drive. If you give it a try too and run across any bugs please let me know. If you have any suggestions for future versions I’m all ears as well.