A while back I posted about some frustration over the apparent performance of my pet project, StoriesAboutGod.

I was considering some major revamping to make the site function more like Digg.  After following Digg for a while, however, I decided that while Digg has a great amount of traffic and quantity of posts/comments the overall quality of the community was pretty poor and not something I wanted to emulate.  I’d rather the site be a source for original content rather than just another collection of links with some added comments.

From a design perspective - there’s just something about the look/feel/content of the Stories site that still appeals to me.  Somehow it came out feeling elegant, quiet, and reflective— very different from other sites that I visit on a daily basis. 

From a traffic perspective, the site is ranking quite highly for some pretty generic search terms - like “god’s provision” at #4 (!).  It was the search ranking that sold me sticking to the current implementation, making some small changes, and then do more from a “marketing” perspective to drive traffic up. 

And people keep finding it.  Stories are still coming in here and there.

So - I decided to try some incremental changes this weekend - most of them being suggested in the comments of the “failure” thread. 

Here’s what I got done:

• Upgraded to ExpressionEngine 1.4.2
• Deleted the ability to phone stories in - no one had used it and it was costing me $5/mo.
• Reimplemented the navigation tabs to be bigger and centered
• Pulled the first 100 words or so of the latest story to the home page.
• Pulled recent comments to the home page and other “non-story pages”
• Changed most of the list icons, and added other icons from the Silk Icons set
• Added a “social bookmark this story” link that allows people to submit the story to different social bookmarking sites.

• FAQ/Help Section with guidance on what to write, how to write, etc
• Author “badge” - a graphic for story authors to post on their own site (since most seem to be bloggers as well).
• Print style sheet

But I’ve had too many hours in the chair today...so will get those done another day.... Take a look, and see what you think.

Oh - I did also come across this site today: http://www.shareyourstorynow.org/

Makes you wonder...