We would like you to explore some design improvements for https://smallbiztrends.com.  Please make changes on the staging site, at http://biztrends.biz. Also, keep track of changes so that Leland knows what you changed and can move those changes over live. 

We would like your help, Basil, so we can achieve the following goals:

* Look more like a professional publication, and not so much like a blog. In other words, help our brand look more impressive at first glance. 
* Increase pageviews.  If we can get people to click on a second page more often, we can earn more revenue from CPM ads. Right now we have around 1.3 to 1.4 pageviews per visit, if I remember right.  It would awesome to get to 2 pageviews per visit, on average, within the next 6 months.  I am not sure if that is possible, but any improvement is a win. 
* Increase engaged time on page. Our engagement signals are actually pretty good. But I would like more people to read all the way to the bottom of the page. Scroll depth is important. It increases our revenue, so it pays off in business benefits.  We have tried using Zoho Pagesense (similar to Crazy Egg) on a few pages.  I will provide a login so you can see the  testing on those pages.  It may provide some valuable data to you, Basil. 
* Make pages easier to read. We have a lot of content on pages - some are very long. So they have to be easy to read. 
* Make fonts a little cleaner and a bit more contemporary, so we look "up to date". We prefer a no-serif style, such as Open Sans or something similar. Also, I like your idea of limiting the number of fonts. I did not realize we were using so many different fonts. 
* Make it look good on desktop, tablet and mobile. We still get a lot of desktop traffic -- as we are a business site.  But mobile is becoming more important.
* Do not change the page layout dramatically. We prefer to make a series of small tweaks and changes. Major changes to the page structure can mess up our ad revenue and Google search rankings. I view this as an ongoing project, and we will have many small changes that we make in iterations over time.  In other words, no need to change everything at once. We can always make more changes gradually over time. Think "evolution not revolution."
* FYI:  here is the Elementor page that Mohsin designed for a WordPress tag page.  I like the fonts on this:  https://smallbiztrends.com/tag/national-small-business-week
* Also, note the changes to the home page on the staging site that Mohsin recently made.
* Do not worry about the empty widget you pointed out -- I am taking that off the page.  

Please work on the suggestions you already made.  I think if we can look at them in the staging environment, then we can give feedback.  Here is what you wrote in the Skype window last week:

Hello again. I went through https://smallbiztrends.com to review it from a UI/UX perspective and here's what I've gathered: the site uses 5 fonts (Open Sans, Roboto, Arial, Cantarell and Tahoma) which is a bit too many. Having 3 fonts at max (one for headings, one optionally for subheadings, last for paragraphs and other texts) is usually more than enough. The site only uses Serif type fonts which is all good, but having a combination of 2-3 fonts at max helps a lot in maintaining the uniformity and the integrity of the design. The website uses a combination of red, blue and white mostly (excluding the normal text color) which is provides a nice contrast from a UX point of view. Though the anchor tags on hover turn into a bright shade of blue which is a bit off-putting. Headings are blue and the hyperlinks are red, and having them turn blue on hover coincides with the color of the headings which affects the user's readibility since the color pops out. In such cases, having the hyperlinks turn a darker shade of red or maybe adding an animated underline is good enough especially because it helps to showcase a level of interactability while still retaining the user's attention without distracting them and without affecting the integrity of the design.

The headings on the posts are bit too far away from the text with a relatively massive image between them and the article which is a bit distracting at first glance from a UX point of view. If possible, having the heading lined up atop the article is a relatively better idea however if that's not possible then making the heading pop out a bit would be a good alternative as well. The headings are already pretty bold, though, so one way of making a bold heading still stand out is making its meta information (date posted, name of the poster, category name etc.) a bit faint or a lighter shade. Also, I noticed there's some gap on the sides of the text container (https://i.imgur.com/Co33Kr0.png) which further congests everything inside of it; removing it so the white background becomes vertically inline with the navbar adds a sense of uniformity from a UI perspective and helps give the content inside some room to breathe and make it easier for readers to read.

There are these empty widgets(?) on the side (https://i.imgur.com/gAx4RK2.png) and they look pretty out of place. If these kind of widgets require third-party data to populate themselves then it's generally a good idea to have some placeholder text or icon in there to let the reader know that there's nothing wrong with the website and instead there's no data to be fetched. An example of that would be the Empty component in Ant Design (https://i.imgur.com/EnevLkq.png). If that's not doable, then just making them invisible works too. For some cards on the posts pages (especially visible on the sponsered pages), there are some 'Sponsored' banners that look awkwardly offset when there's no excerpt to show (https://i.imgur.com/1LT9db7.png) which conflicts with the other normal cards so for these sponsored banners, they should always be stuck to the bottom of the cards. The same happens when the excerpt is too small. Also, if the title is too long, the sponsored banner just vanishes (https://i.imgur.com/rXlHSrk.png).

The thumbnails on the cards should naturally take up all the space they're given without being given any paddings (https://i.imgur.com/w50ViL6.png). It makes the cards feel more natural and it is essentially how they're stylized in almost every design system out there.

