Your site needs to look good

Does your site need to look good? Sure it does. At the expense of other things? Well, that becomes another issue.

All in all most wordpress themes that you find today, are not laid out the best, nor are the "Stock" color selections all that wonderful. I understand wanting to change a theme and make it yours. But, there is really a science behind color and layout and the overall design of a page. If you do not have even a basic grasp of these concepts, unless you are Joe Average, your personal choices will probably send you away from a norm and more into a Like it or hate it design.

The OP mentions that they changed the theme and got better page views per visitor and a lower bounce rate. Chances are better than good if we ( I ) was to look at the 2 designs ( before and after ) it could probably be pointed out as to why there were increases. I would venture to say without looking that the themes that more than likely the navigation was a bit clearer and OR the new theme was designed around a standard page layout pattern.

For those of you not familiar with the concepts here is a well written article on the 3 basic Design Layouts Not only do they explain the "Z" "F" and "Zig Zag" layouts they also note how one can effectively disrupt these patterns. ( Before I get blasted with "That's old stuff man" or what ever.. yes these patterns are "Dated" but again I am just showing the basics. To understand more advanced layouts such as grid etc, you should at least understand the basics. )

To get an even deeper understanding of layout and design you might want to look at this PDF: Learning Layouts for Single-Page Graphic Designs This one in particular is real scholastic white paper stuff. A good read if you are really interested in the concepts.

When ever I personally am asked "What is the most important thing to focus on in web design?" I always have and always will answer this with 1 word. NAVIGATION. The age old saying "Form Follows Function" A person coming onto your site on any page should be able to get to any piece of content with in 3 clicks. If you have a e-commerce site.. A customer should be able to land on your home page and be able to select the item they are looking for in 3 CLICKS.

The ONLY way that you can accomplish this, is thru very precise and clearly laid out navigation. And again before any calls out BS... try it for yourself. Goto any major E-commerce site and try it. For those of you that do not want to bother.. well look at it this way. I want to find a pair of black shorts. 'Home Page' I then click 'Mens' I then click 'Shorts' I then sort by color ( click ) and there are the shorts I want.

Even easier... Search Type in "mens black shorts" click search, and in theory the shorts of my dreams should be there. ( that's only 1 click by the way )

This brings up an interesting side topic, SEARCH. Wordpress and Woocommerce search basically sucks. If you are serious about your site performing at its best you really need to consider a aftermarket premium plugin. I personally use SearchWP. Thru my personal research I found it to be the most effect best performing search plugin on the market, and I tried all of them. It doesn't hurt at all that the support staff is on top of it either.

Now getting back to Navigation. I am going to share a flaw that 99.9% of everyone that is reading this will and does make in their overall page design.

We all understand that Content is the base to getting more page views and fewer bouncers. As an example I build a site about meat. I write an article about beef, the next day about lamb, and the next about pork etc. All of these articles would of course be within the context of the overall site theme HOWEVER, if you are using pagenation linking the adjoining articles the individual context is lost, and you simply have non related content.

Someone that is coming to my site to read an article about "Beef" is more likely to click on another article about beef, than they are an article about pork. IF additional "Beef" options are not readily available at the end of the article, you more than likely will create a bounce visitor. If content is king.... learning how to place content within context of itself is God.

A little trick that I do when writing content. I don't write A ( one ) article on a subject I write 4 to 6. I then place them into the site at the same time. I place the last article in first, and the first article in last. If you happen to have a "Recent Posts" section somewhere on your page you will then notice that the new content falls in order Article #1 #2 #3 #4 etc. I then go thru each article and place links to the next article as well as a link to the first article.

If someone lands on article #3 in a series, on the bottom there will be a link to article 4 as well as article 1. Kind of like a micro Silo structure. I have actually coined the term "hay bail" of content when doing this. There is SEO benefits to this practice, and there is user end ease of use advantages in this as well. What is good for your visitors, will always be good for you.

Anyways I have probably rambled on enough...

Hope that Helps!