The Kevin Dolan is Now Ad-free!
You may have noticed over the last couple days, there has been a real push to optimize The Kevin Dolan for the best possible user-experience. That included adding the critters, removing and rearranging some ads throughout the site, and caching the webpages. Well we are now proud to announce that The Kevin Dolan is now completely ad-free!
This decision came at the realization that in the entire life of The Kevin Dolan, there has not been a single click on any ad. While my other sites are fairly successful with ads, I just don’t think the ad-structure works with blogs like this.
So I reluctantly decided to remove any and all google ads from The Kevin Dolan; you’re welcome. I hope you enjoy the experience.
You also may begin to notice pages loading a whole lot faster. I installed some caching software to try to make everything go quicker. It seems to work very nicely; so now The Kevin Dolan can handle all the traffic that it may receive after all of my optimizations are complete.
You will also notice that the post picture (the headline picture in every post) is more intuitively integrated. When on an index page, it links to the article, but when viewing a post, it links to a full-size picture. I noticed a lot of visitors accessing the same page several times in a row, indicating that the way it worked before was a little ridiculous.
Also, after spending 20 seconds on a page (which indicates to me, at least, you are interested), a bar along the bottom pops out allowing you to submit the article to various social bookmarking sites. I think this might increase the chances of a submission.
Perhaps the biggest change of all is that I increased the size of the content space, while pushing the sidebar further to the right. I think this really focuses your attention on the content, rather than some meaningless links.
There will undoubtedly be more great changes in the works, including more integration to social networks. If you have any other suggestions, please email me.
I approve.