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:
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
FAQs
- What has changed?
- What are we doing about the rest of our marketing collateral?
- Where's the recruitment section?
- What does this mean for my local site?
- Who's been involved?
- Who's going to be responsible?
- How do I add a case study?
- How do I add news?
- I've got a change (or feedback) to send you in private. How should I do that?
- What are we going to do about search engines?
- I'm a web geek. Tell me, really, what makes this so cool?
WHAT HAS CHANGED?
First of all, we've made the site easier for the user. The new site is designed less around what we want to tell people, and more about what they want to find out. Early tests show that users take less time to perform common tasks on the new site than they did on the old one.
We've also designed a site where our work and thought speaks for us, and has a much more prominent position than before. The new site highlights case studies -- clicking on these draws the casual viewer into the site to see our services and our work.
We've also pushed a lot more information onto the front page of the site. And we link out much more to the rest of the web. You'll see links to company blogs, and news stories in the trade and mainstream media
It's important that we demonstrate the strength of our international network - so we're pushing more international information to the front page.
There's more space given to the individual offices. Each has its own page, and with your help we will soon be able to feed local news and job ads to those pages. There's going to be an office finder on the front page, so it will be easy to get there, too!
Most importantly, there's increased focus on the people who make up Porter Novelli. More people are featured across the site, there are more bios, and every case study has a contact who users can contact if they want to find out more.
You'll be surprised to hear that there are around 600 pages on the new site. For such a large site, it's surprisingly easy to navigate -- it takes only two or three clicks to get anywhere.
And there's a very powerful content management system (CMS) behind the whole thing that makes it easy to change the content of any page, and to add new pages.
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WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT OUR OTHER MARKETING COLLATERAL?
Based on the new web design, London and New York design gurus are working on new templates for all our documents and marketing collateral -- which will be released in tandem with the new site.
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WHY NEXT FRIDAY?
We want a weekend in between changing the servers over. That should give us a couple of days for:
(a) some technical stuff to happen ("for the DNS records to propagate" - if you really *must* know), and
(b) to fix anything that suddenly-and-for-no-reason-at-all just goes wrong.
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WHAT RESEARCH DID WE DO BEFORE WE STARTED?
A great deal. Among other things we carried out a competitive website review, which you can see (and share) at:
I would really encourage you to read through this: you'll note how the new site is not only better than the old site, but better than any of the competition. Hill & Knowlton launched their new site during our redesign period: we reviewed it on our production blog at:
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WHERE'S THE RECRUITMENT SECTION?
The recruitment section is currently one of the most popular sections of the site. We're working hard to make it even better, and it'll be there soon (in release 1.5)
The new site will offer a much improved recruitment section which will include:
(a) Career profiles (description of various roles in our offices),
(b) Discover Porter Novelli (a description of what it's like to work at Porter Novelli, and what makes us different),
(c) Job search (a powerful engine that searches opportunities across our global network),
(d) Job specification (detailed description of career opportunities)
(e) Online applications (send your details and CV to the person responsible for HR in the specific office)
We'll be offering HR teams training on this as soon as it is available, and before we release it.
The new section has a provisional launch date in January -- which is when many people are likely to be looking for new jobs. The careers section had 8.4K views in Jan 2008, almost 2K more than the average month.
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WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR MY LOCAL COUNTRY SITE?
For those international offices who run a country site, we'll work with you to bring your site in line with the new creative as soon as we can.
If you currently self-host, we'll either bring you onto one of our servers, or help you install the new Content Management System (CMS) yourselves. We will be coming to you to help create a roll-out plan early in Q1 2009.
See also:
http://snurl.com/7v3d3 for an early discussion of this.
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WHO'S BEEN INVOLVED?
Well, we've asked lots of people for feedback: you can see some of it on our development blog which we've been keeping as a kind of diary of what we've been going through. Here you can see everything from our early pen-and-paper concept designs and technical wireframes through to the nitty-gritty detail work we've been doing for the past couple of months:
But really, the EC, Service & Growth Committee and worldwide Senior Leadership have been all been invited to feedback at critical times, and each Service leader has had a chance to sign-off on the copy and functionality. Every office has had a chance to check (and change) their details. And we've sneak previewed the site on a number of occasions to current staff, ex-employees on LinkedIn, Porter Novelli's Facebook fans, and a bunch of people on Twitter.
Marian Salzman - our global CMO - has been truly helpful throughout the process; offering support wherever required.
And Jean Wyllie (who'll probably kill me for putting this in) has been brilliant at putting up with my moments of "creative temperament" and giving me excellent advice.
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WHO'S GOING TO BE RESPONSIBLE?
In the short term, my development team in London will continue to be responsible for all content. I've also asked Eddie Garrett and Jules Allen who run the Washington web team to look after the infrastructure.
In the medium term we are recruiting a web editor who will likely reside in New York, and be responsible for content updates (among other things).
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Tim Hoang on my team who has done inhuman (and uncomplaining) amounts of work on the new site. He has been a true star, and I can't imagine how we would have got to where we are without him.
More to the point, Tim will continue to work as our interim web editor until we hire his full-time replacement. So I'm sure he'll appreciate any positive feedback you leave as much as (if not more than) I will.
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HOW DO I ADD CASE STUDIES?
As mentioned previously, case studies and examples of our work are the most critical content on the new site (this is completely new: there were no case studies on the old site.) Lots of people have helped pull together new case study content for the new site but particular mention should be made of Marian Salzman, Chris Lynch, Tom Kelley and Martha Ginsberg who - on short notice - managed to pull together all the US case studies we needed.
We have invested a lot of time in making sure that we have the right content management system; this lets us add new case studies quickly and easily, and we are always hungry for more.
We've created a case study template so that you can submit nre Please download and fill in the Case Study Template which you can find at:
Send the completed templates to Tim Hoang. Please ensure you copy me (so I know what you've been doing) and do copy Marian Salzman -- as global CMO she'll want to be on top of all this content!
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HOW DO I ADD NEWS?
News is a big feature of our front page. Every day, somewhere in the world a Porter Novelli office has won a new client, a new brief, completed a campaign, or hired a new person. We want it to become second nature for our offices to publish this news on our site.
We mentioned that we're hiring a web editor, but we also intend to train "news editors" in every office. They'll have the ability to post news to the site for sign-off by the web editor and Marian's team.
In the meantime, Tim and I will be covering this role between us.
To add news to the site there are two things you can do:
(1) If it's a Porter Novelli story, send it to Tim Hoang (again, please copy Marian Salzman and me).
Content needs to be in English, but we'd all love to hear stories about client wins and successful campaigns from all around the world as they happen. Historically current front page gets around 15K views a month, so that's a lot of free exposure for your story. All I can tell you is that the traffic to the new site will be much higher.
We'll also be promoting PN coverage in trade and mainstream media. We've done is create a clippings feed that will help promote these stories across the web -- and placed the most recent stories on the front page of the site.
So if you have a story ABOUT Porter Novelli that's run in the mainstream or trade press (and if it rates as positive or neutral in sentiment) please send Tim Hoang a link, and we'll add it to our clippings feed. You can see the clippings feed here:
http://delicious.com/porternovelliinthenews
These clippings stories will soon feature on your local office page, and the ultimate plan is to link it back to you on your personal bio page...
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I'VE GOT A CHANGE (OR FEEDBACK) TO SEND YOU IN PRIVATE. HOW SHOULD I DO THAT?
Don't. Please use the feedback system on the website. Again - we've created a button (clearly marked "feedback") on the site that lets you do this, or simply visit http://feedback.porternovelli.com
This is the ONLY way to communicate any changes. Please do not email me directly.
We believe that it's good practice that all feedback is in an open/transparent environment. This openness is a Porter Novelli value, and - significantly - what the market demands. It's a point of differentiation and we should be proud of it.
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WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?
Currently 25% of our visitors never see the front page. They click on a search engine result (generally in Google) and jump straight to the page that they're looking for. It is really important that they understand what we do on *whichever page they may land*.
Porter Novelli already places well for "international PR agency" on Google. Currently we're #5 on Google for that search. We're also #5 for "international public relations agency", #9 for "international public relations", and #14 for "international PR." There's strong competition for the "global" equivalents from other agencies, so we're focusing on "international". Also - don't tell them this - but more people search for "international x" than "global x".
We are currently in discussion about how we'll change the strap line in line with this information.
Because we're changing all the pages around, we're also putting a list of "redirects" in place. If someone clicks on a link to an old page that is no longer there on the new site, this list will automagically send them to the new page. This may not work perfectly, but our redirects list is 160 lines long and should cover off most of the old site.
We're doing a lot of other best practice stuff like this; all a bit technical, and all very detailed and time-consuming. With any luck, this means that the site redesign will not affect our search engine rankings negatively in the short term, and will soon increase our positions.
We (and the web editor) will be continuing actively to optimize our search rankings, and will share notes with you to let you know how you will be able to help.
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I'M A WEB GEEK. TELL ME, REALLY, WHAT MAKES THIS SO COOL?
In special 10-things format:
1) Valid XHTML - the site works in any browser. We are the only major PR or advertising agency where this is true.
2) Accessible (WAI level 1) - complies with disabilities rights legislation in all countries. Again, only major PR pr agency where this is true.
3) Multiple content feeds in and out of the site.
4) We are the ONLY major marcomms agency website that works on an iPhone right now. Really.
5) No Flash (see points 1,2,4, above.)
6) Some deeply funky stuff happening with delicious.com that lets us create global, local, and personal clippings feeds from the same content stream (see: http://snurl.com/7v61p)
7) Only DAS/Omnicom agency to include link to Privacy Policy & T&Cs. You think this stuff doesn't matter? That it's boring? That's why YOU don't get to build the website.
8) Human-guessable URLs that can be used as a User Interface as per Jesse James Garrett and Jakob Nielsen. see: http://snurl.com/7v68d and http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321.html for more on this. (In layman's terms, you can read our URLs and know where you are in the site, and if wanted to, you could navigate through the site by adding to and chopping bits off the URL. You don't want to do this? Fine. But it's just great for our DDA/ADA compliance and for the search engines.)
9) Some session-based stuff going on so that the front page and the service section page are always in tune. Looks easy. Is funky.
10) All built on open source tools. Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) architecture, running Drupal as the CMS. This makes us very Web 2.0 (all the cool Web 2 kids are LAMP)
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WHY HAS IT TAKEN SO LONG?
Who are you, my girlfriend?
I really hope you've actualy read this far -- you should all feel very proud of the new site; and I must say I'm really pleased with the way it's turned out. Feel free to turn your noses up at other agencies with their pitiful old-fashioned sites (remember that competitive review we showed you earlier?)
Please remember to leave some feedback. It would be a shame for us all to work so hard and get nothing in the way of recognition. And we have worked hard. Tim, Chris, (me) and our wonderful development team at Wilson Fletcher: Mark, Steph, Sheena, Thomas, Anthony, and Lance. Indeed - THEY'RE so proud of our work that they'll soon be promoting it in the new media/digital media press which will get us some valuable external visibility.
M
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