Why does Cucumbertown have limited themes?
There was some banter on twitter couple days back
There is a reason we have limited themes
With the themes we control, oblivious to most bloggers, we do a lot of optimizations routinely. For example, last month we introduced infinite scroll on saffrontrail’s theme.
We do this with data analysis and scientific principles incorporating ad slots, visibility, integration with third party providers etc.
Optimization and improvements like this are very costly for bloggers to do on their own. Check out this blog post on food blogger pro podcast with Bjork Ostrom.
They mention that a full change like this cost them over 10,000 dollars. Cucumbertown on behalf of you does a lot of these testing and incremental improvements every month. And for that reason we cannot deploy these updates to unlimited themes. It’s practically impossible.
Let me give you another detailed example
Last week we were analyzing some themes with via a method called “heatmaps”. This allows us to understand where people are clicking on a page and more the number more the intense heat you see.
As you see above, one interesting aspect of these analysis is that, people are clicking on images. A lot.
Our hypothesis is that, with food blogs and the pretty detailed pictures, people expect to see more of them, like a Flickr album. This theme study resulted in us adding a feature plan to make each photo part of an album. Expect a feature on this sometime from now.
And quite obviously, the themes we are able to change will have this feature. Like saffrontrail’s infinite scroll.
In addition to all these, our efforts are focused on directing features to work well on the mobile app (that we are planning) where the bulk of the traffic is coming from.
Hope this helps to answer our limited theme capability although we intend to expand to some more themes soon.
