I have been experimenting with blog interfaces using Squible for about a week. I have come to some conclusions and some hypotheses.
Without a doubt Squible has lowered the bounce rate from my home page (bounce rate is the number of people who leave after viewing that one page). In some ways this holds up my theory about the Squible interface being more appealing to the kind of users that prefer not to read a blog in an aggregator. Especially when you also take into account the fact that the average page views seem to be about the same.
I would like to increase the average page view though. I think Squible is a step in the right direction for a “home page” but I do think that the rest of the blog requires a little more tweaking. I have been using a cool “Live Archives” plugin that is nice and AJAX-y, but it is slow, an that is a BIG problem. I also found that Squible does not seem to allow people to just go back a little further from what they are looking at now. That needs to be improved. I also need to find a way to add the good ole calendar back to pages so that you can quickly skip to a date.
Basically with Squible the tag pages and category pages seem pretty worthless. But it is a good step in the right direction. I am going to keep experimenting as I have time.
