I'm going to be putting in an optional feature: Strictly Minimal.

The question is who wants to try it?

What it does?

It removes ALL unnecessary elements from the page:

Keywords (Links)
Categories (Links)
ALL WIDGETS

Leaving nothing more than picture, content, title, and product table.

Not only does your page get extremely lightweight and easy on the eyes, your content relevance should become super concentrated (not diluted) due to the removal of ALL unnecessary content.

I noticed http://stompstock.com/ had a decline in sales after an absolutely amazing start. I wondered if this had to do with the addition of widgets. Thats what inspired me.

---

If you want to test it out, you can report your findings here as you monitor analytics and more importantly sales. I'll put up a little poll, since poles are fun.

(PS - have you noticed I got my energy back today? Daily hike does wonders)

Perfectly cool. Its quite a toss-up. SEO will pretty much always be the biggest focus of this thing, so expect little experiments here and there.

Basically you sacrifice what could be a lot of visual aid to customers, to get a HUGE advantage in SEO. You'd have to accommodate by making your dropdown menues and secondary navigation more detailed.

Keep in mind though its just an option. I just want to see who will try it or its not going to get tracked very well.

I noticed http://stompstock.com/ had a decline in sales after an absolutely amazing start. I wondered if this had to do with the addition of widgets. Thats what inspired me.

After a week of no action, I had three sales within a few hours of each other earlier this week. Another customer contacted me for some extended license options which brought in another $130.

Traffic and sales are down a bit, but absolutely nothing to complain about.

I'm going to start another SY site for my photography soon, I'd be willing to try your new "minimal" theme.

Quote from: Leo on August 01, 2013, 16:14

I noticed http://stompstock.com/ had a decline in sales after an absolutely amazing start. I wondered if this had to do with the addition of widgets. Thats what inspired me.

After a week of no action, I had three sales within a few hours of each other earlier this week. Another customer contacted me for some extended license options which brought in another $130.

Traffic and sales are down a bit, but absolutely nothing to complain about.

I'm going to start another SY site for my photography soon, I'd be willing to try your new "minimal" theme.

When stuff like that happens you have to tell people!!!!

!!!

People are always wondering what Symbio does for them, and I my wife needs to know I'm not wasting our time

Basically you sacrifice what could be a lot of visual aid to customers, to get a HUGE advantage in SEO.

But you'll only get the HUGE advantage in SEO when you add MORE unique content (like description) to the page, don't you?
Having the widgets (similar images) and keywords etc is basically a way to add content without the need to get more creative as a writer, isn't it?

I'm an amateur at SEO, but my understanding is that search engines don't like keywords.  They like sentences.  But I could be way off base.

I agree with you but I guess search engines like keywords more than no content.
What I'm saying is that in a perfect world every one of your web pages would have 300 words of highly relevant content without any distracting or diluting text.
The reality is that most people (me included) only have a short title and a few words of description as high relevant content on image pages. Then come a few titles, links (from widgets) and keywords as content with lower relevancy.
If we now take out the widgets and the keywords - all that's left is that little bit of title and description.
I kind of doubt that a page in that state would get better listed at SEs but I'm no expert at that either.
Except you put more relevant content into it which means you'd have to get creative as a writer to put a lot more text to every image page. Much more work. Not sure if I'd find the time to take pictures anymore.