Under Construction

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, good-bye!

The site has been now been live for two months, and the story of how our web site came into being is now over. As a result, we'll be shutting this blog down now, although we'll leave it here as a record of the journey we took and the decisions we made.

If you'd like to see more about how we got to where we are today, I'd recommend reading the following articles.

Early Days

The first post (May 22 2008)

Why is there a shark on our home page?  What do we want our new site to look like?

Competitive Review (May 28)

What's everyone else up to? What are the table stakes?

What is it going to look like?

First Round Visual Treatment (June 10)

Here's where we began thinking about what the site could look like and canvassing opinions from around the company. Do click through to see the mood boards that we pulled together to help us decide which design routes were best for us!

Second Round Visual Treatment (July 15)

And here, a month later is where we ended up. The site's visual treatment continued to evolve, but this is already recognizable as our new site!

The Navigation Bar (July 10)

Here's just one example of the kinds of tweaks we've made. Everything about the site was looked at in at least this level of detail!

How will it work?

First Round Information Architecture (Wireframes) (June 25)

Behind the visual design, there's lots of thinking going on in terms of usability and accessibility. Here are our initial sketches for how the pages would work.

Latest Wireframes (December 15)

And here are the blueprints that we were working from when the site launched.

Proposed Site Map (July 11)

It's essential early on that you agree a clear direction for what content you need, and where it's all going to fit. Of course things will change, but a decent site map helps you imagine the ways that users will travel through your site. Have you put everything where they can find it?

Getting ready for launch

Home Stretch (September 30)

Sometimes you think that it's all clear blue water ahead...

Site Slips (October 13)

...only to find...

Still No Launch (December 5)

...that it isn't! Launching a site is pure hard work. It seems sometimes that more work goes into snagging, bug fixing, and pulling content together than into the infrastructure itself!

Email Announcing New Site (December 12, 2008)

Hooray! We're going live!

Post launch

As I said earlier, the site has now been live for two months. During this time, traffic has increased by more than a third (30K visits over the past month compared to 19.5K this time last year.) Average time on site has increased from 2:12 minutes to 2:50 minutes, but average page views have decreased, suggesting that people are able to find the content they need with fewer clicks. If we were a publisher it would be a different story, but given the nature of our business and the content of the site, if time on site and page views were both up it would suggest that people were having to click around a lot to get what they needed.

Our search engine visibility is up (partly as a result of the massive increase in content we managed to push through.) There are over 1K pages from our site indexed on Google (although there are still several things we could do to improve our search visibility.) Today (February 25, 2009), we place in the top 5 on Google for the searches like "international PR firm", "international public relations agency", and "international PR agency." Looking for an international PR agency, anyone? Partly as a result of this increased visibility, we now receive 11.4K visits per month from search engines -- a year on year increase of 17.5%.

And (as I mention elsewhere), it's the only major agency site to use valid XHTML, meet accessibility guidelines, and work on an iPhone. For an agency that helped invent social marketing, works with government clients around the world, and has a thriving tech practice, those are all important goals to have met.

Overall, our new site is a huge success. This is a good place to end a blog.

New contact/office locator pages

We've yet to address the office locator on the front page, but here's a quick look at how we're changing the contact section and office locator in the next iteration of the site. You can click on any of these images and see larger versions stored on our Flickr set.

First of all, here's the Contact page:

And here's the current "alphebetical list" approach made a little more interactive:

And this is the new search function. The engine behind this will eventually power the search on the front page:

Latest version of the Wire Frames

Just because we're getting close to launch doesn't mean that we're not still developing the site.

Below you can see the latest version of the Wire frames showing how the functionality and IA (information architecture) are still changing ready for the next iteration of the site.

PN Wire Frames 1.4

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Marketing Business website wireframe

Email announcing new site...

Hello everyone,

The Porter Novelli website will finally be going live next Friday (19 December.)

We're rather proud of what we've achieved. The new site is better, stronger, faster than the old site, but we know that there are still lots of tweaks that could make it better still.

This is where you come in. We need your feedback. Please take some time to test it, click on links, read the copy, and see how it works.

You can find it here:

        http://67.207.146.35/

This new site is something of which you should all be able to feel proud. So please help us by getting engaged, and by leaving feedback -- whether good, or "constructive." You'll see that there's a handy little feedback tab that we'll be leaving there for the launch period for EXACTLY this purpose. Even id you DON'T have any feedback, read through other people's notes and comments in the feedback forum (at http://feedback.porternovelli.com) and vote on the suggestions you like the sound of. We *will* listen to what you have to say, and figure it into our plans. We'll also be letting our clients, prospects, prospective employees, ex-employees (and - yes - our competitors should they so wish) leave feedback so please, MAKE SURE YOUR VOICE IS HEARD!

I know that once you've seen the site, you'll want to know more. Please refer to the FAQs below for lots of interesting detail.

Warmest wishes

Mat Morrison
Global Digital Planning Director

Sneak Peeks

I've been pushing out sneak peeks of the site for early feedback to Porter Novelli's Facebook fans (163), LinkedIn Alumni Group (61), my Facebook friends (426) and my Twitter followers (358) Allowing for quite a lot of cross-over, and the fact that this is a weekend, this is still should put a few close friends and family through the site for more pre-launch testing. Google has begun to pick up the site in its spidering crawls, too: already 269 pages have been crawled before we really launch the site. We've got a list of 160 redirects that should stop most people from experiencing a "404 Not Found" error when they click old links to the site to pages that no longer exist (instead they'll be directed seamlessly to the new page.) This will also help with the Google search spider. So you could say that Google's getting a sneak peek too.

Still no launch...

It's more than a month since my last post. A month since the first failure to launch.

We thought we were ready to launch a few weeks ago on the 31st October, but our "we'll fix it when it's live" message went down poorly with enough senior people that we had to delay launch until everyone had had a chance to change their bits and pieces.

Of course, this gave me time to fiddle too. Our development team at Wilson Fletcher has been very patient!

 

 

 

 

One of the biggest problems (now addressed) was the startling lack of US case studies. "Fine," we said, "send us some case studies, and we'll drop them into the site as soon as we get them."

Wrangles over copy were another big area of concern. This is entirely my fault. I have been most concerned with creating sound usable "buckets" for the content, and have not budgeted enough time or process to concerning myself with the content that goes into those buckets.

This despite the fact that one of the objectives for the site was to translate everything into Plain English (I'd want one of the Plain English Campaign's Crystal Marks  if they weren't so godawfully ugly. Perhaps I could approach them about this...)

On the whole, the buckets are sound; the information architecture (IA) is good, and early/informal usability tests have identified only a few problems, the site is accessible (good not only for ADA/Disabilties Act compliance - which will quietly put us head-and-shoulders above the competition when it comes to CSR, but also for improved search engine visibility), and the content management system is simple to use, meaning that we can rapidly train contacts in every office to add and manage news, contact details, and the like.

The blog integration is exciting and new. With our Legal Counsels help, we will soon be the only large DAS/Omnicom agency network that I can find that will have both the minimum legal fig-leaves of a "terms and conditions" and a "privacy policy" page.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

But we soldiered ahead and made the changes and jumped through the hoops.

Here's what we've been up to recently:

• We've invited all the heads of office around the network to check their office pages. Most of them have bent over backwards to help us out, and been most supportive. Thanks guys!
• We've had all the heads of practice check out the pages that are relevant to them. Again - they've been really helpful getting stuff to us!
• We've collected US Case Studies. Should you wish to get your case study up there, ask me, and I'll send you a template.
• We changed the strap that said "the global PR agency" to our old strap, "Many Minds, Singular Results". Our main reasons for running with the "global PR agency" were purely pragmatic. It's a clear sign-post to visitors who arrive at our site what we do (bear in mind that at present at least 25% of visitors arrive at a page other than the home page.) And it helps us push some key search terms into a heading-level page element, which is essential for SEO. Our current approach has led to us holding the undisputed number one spot for - you guessed it.

Today, we were all geared up to launch again, but have had another last minute change of plans. This is (of course) slightly frustrating.

Seriously, check out the new site!

We're still missing two pretty big bits of the site -- the easy office finder, and the whole careers section. They're due in release 1.5 of the site (which on the old production time-line would have been launched today.)

So - yes - I'm frustrated. But I'd rather launch with a site that everyone's pleased with than one that immediately gathers complaints.

Speaking of which - you'll see that we've added a "feedback" tab to the side of the new site. Please feel free to leave feedback and suggestions there!

Snagging

Tim and I are ploughing through the site, making changes, marking stuff up for the designers to look at and change.

There's still a lot to do if we're going to launch this weekend.

Here's a quick glimpse at the sort of stuff we're doing - click the picture below for a closer look.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Tell us what you think!

So the new site is finally live on the servers where it will be hosted. We haven't swapped the porternovelli.com domain name over to it because we don't think we're finally there, yet.

Some things are easy to change. Most of the body copy, for example. We'll be going through this with a fine-tooth comb soon, so any glaring inconsistencies, typos and the like will be picked up. We'll also do a proper re-write of some of the areas.

There are plenty of pieces of the jigsaw missing from this version. We just wanted to get something up live as soon as we can. Notable exceptions are:

• The whole careers section is missing. This will contain a backgrounder on what it's like to work at Porter, searchable job listings, application forms, and career profiles.
• So are lots of photographs. You'll see that some people appear with a "mystery person" silhouette. We've collected lots of photos, scraped some off the intranet, and we've held two photo sessions for our EMEA and Lat Am senior leadership. We'll be putting these into the site. I still can't get my boss, Jean Wyllie, to get a decent photo taken.
• So is the global office selector. This will sit on the front page and make it easier to get contact details for individual offices.
• So are lots of case studies. A few of you answered Tim's call for case studies, and you ted to be the people whose case studies have made it to the new site. You'll notice that we're looking for case studies with big hard numbers attached to them to highlight the impact of our work at Porter.

But there are other things missing too. Please help us by posting your comments below; telling us what we should be doing, what you like and what you don't. Tell us what you think of the language. Point us to better sources of content. Rewrite whole sections. I can't promise that we'll fix everything, but we'll listen to what you're telling us.

If you'd like to give clients a sneak preview of the site, we'd be really pleased to get their feedback too! Just point them to http://67.207.146.35/ for the meantime.

Worst bit of site

I’d like to start this post by firstly apologising in advance. We are nearing the end of the first phase of the web site with the soft launch today. I’m getting cranky at work and realising that we are missing bits of information and will probably be sending some: “Sorry to disturb you buy we are missing XXXX information from the site – can you get it over to me 10 mins ago?” emails over the next day. I'm on the phone constantly to the web site designers checking up where this is and when that will be complete (again, sorry).

Thanks then particularly to everyone who has responded promptly to my requests. Mark Nusca’s quick and to the point “Here you go, hope this helps” emails particularly stick out.

We have pretty much all the info we need for the initial pages we are launching with. It would be nice to have a few more images, but then it would be nice to have my toilet seat made of gold. Right now we are concentrating on finalising the final layout. It is now about literally combing the site, and highlighting all the tiniest edits. I envisage long nights (doing it during regular hours will be a nightmare with constant interruptions) and a weekend but it will be worth it once the site is complete.

Site slips

We’re going to be late with the site. Apologies for the over eagerness last week, I’m young and excitable and we had all the content complete but some of the back-end stuff is taken longer than usual.

I don’t want to make excuses, but the site is more complicated than it looks. There are very few levels to the website yet all these need to be linked at various stages and in a specific order. For instance: each case study has an introductory question and answer. The question will be featured in the banner on the home page with the answer on the expertise page. This then has to be linked to the actual case study page itself which pulls the contact from the staff database [which itself is dynamic]. Obviously this also has to be synched up, so that the questions and answers all match for each visit.

There is also the issue of the blog feeds. We need to aggregate all our posts which update automatically and include the relevant picture. This is probably the issue that is taking longest to fix but looks like it’s pretty much there.

We tried to have a basic site to go live with on the 15th but decided that it might do more damage than good and as I’ve already mentioned, large areas of the site are dependent on each other. The site is only worth going ahead with if we can have all the integrated levels working properly. It may not be perfect at the time of launch but it will be at a point where would be happy for our clients and potential clients to visit it.

We’ve set a date of Monday 27th October to launch. Fingers crossed.