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.
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Posted by: Armyunderstand | December 07, 2009 at 05:18 AM