After a long hiatus, Retroflexions is back with a brand-new look! When I started the site almost two years ago, I just picked a theme that looked decent and was clean and simple to read. However, after a while the layout started to look a little amateurish, and I was getting really sick of seeing my bald mug staring back at me from the sidebar on every page. So, after taking a few months off, I’ve totally revamped the site with a clean and modern look and I am very excited to start writing again!
However, it’s not just the aesthetics of the site that are changing. Over the past year or so, I have seen a dramatic increase in the traffic to the site (which is very exciting). The interesting thing is that most of my traffic comes from search engines like Google, which is doubly exciting since this means that most people reading the articles here found Retroflexions de novo through organically searching for answers to questions they have about gastrointestinal topics, and not because they know me personally. Between Google searches and the reposting of my articles on the Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News site (where the top article of 2016 was my article on when to stop screening for colon cancer), Retroflexions.com is now getting about 10,000 hits per month. This may not be too great in the grand scheme of the blogging universe, but is a pretty decent increase from the 500 or so hits I was getting during the first several months of starting the site! It’s great to see the traffic increasing every month because it means that people find the site interesting. Be that as it may, I have a bunch of things planned for the site to make it even better.
I have a ton of new topics that I want to cover in the new year (is everyone getting sick of seeing colon polyp pictures yet?), and the only thing that keeps me from writing more often is the very limited time I have to put into this site. It is an “extracurricular” activity after all, and mostly gets done in the few spare hours I have here and there on random nights or weekend mornings. Which leads me the the other exciting announcement: I’m going to start having an occasional guest author on the site to cover some GI-related topics from other perspectives! I am in the process of hand-selecting a few excellent contributors…I think this will make Retroflexions both more interesting and more well-rounded.
So be sure to stay tuned by following Retroflexions on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or by subscribing to the email list.
I only email when a new article is published, so you won’t get any spam emails. If you liked reading something here, please be a pal and share the article with friends on social media or by email, “like” it, or leave a comment somewhere. As before, I still have comments disabled here on the main site (simply because I don’t have time to police the comment section), but I really do like getting comments on the various social media sites!
Oh, and I almost forgot…please take a minute to browse around the new site to make sure everything works well and looks nice on whatever device you use. The new layout looks good on my computer and iPhone, but I haven’t tested it out on other devices. Open up some articles and scroll down to the bottom to see if the box pops up with a link to a related article. Check out the new menus and make sure they look nice and are easy to navigate. If you like to print stuff off this site, there is a nifty PDF generator at the bottom of every article which makes the printout look great…try it! If you find any weirdness, please contact me to let me know; it’s what good friends do! And if you have any feedback or suggestions in general, feel free to shoot me a message anytime.
Thanks for reading…the best is yet to come!
About Frederick Gandolfo, MD
