What Site Features Do You Want to See at Small Business Trends?

This autumn I will be implementing a re-design of the Small Business Trends site.

The new design will include an updated look and make better use of space.

Also, the site platform will be transitioned from Blogger software to WordPress. I've used WordPress on other sites and I am impressed with its simplicity and power. I've enjoyed using Blogger, but the fact is that this site needs more powerful features than Blogger offers today -- features such as categories, integrated search, true trackbacks, and ability to generate individual RSS feeds by category, to name a few.

The new features will make it easier for visitors like you to navigate through the pages of this site and find what you are looking for, especially key features like our Expert interviews and guest columns.

Another key goal is to make this site more accessible and friendly to visitors outside North America.

Despite being based in the United States, we tend to get a significant percentage of traffic (approaching 35% this month) from outside the U.S. Most of the non-U.S. traffic comes from Canada, European Union, India, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, Philippines and other English-speaking places in Southeast Asia.

Below is a global map showing the location of the last 500 visitors to this site. This map shows traffic as of early this morning. Although this map is constantly changing, it gives a reasonable representation of the typical traffic distribution.

Do you notice something? Except for a visitor from Hong Kong, there are zero visitors showing from China, a nation of 94 million Web users. Why? Largely it's because China blocks the blogspot domain. Moving off the Blogger platform and onto our own domain using WordPress will hopefully open this site to more Chinese visitors.

Do you notice something else? There are a mere handful of visitors from Mexico and South America. One of the new design features will be the instant ability to translate a particular post to a few key languages, including Spanish. In this way I hope we can provide more value to our southern neighbors.

What features would you like to see this site include? Please leave a comment below with your suggestions. I'm looking forward to your input.