Managing Websites

Take your intranet on the road (or to the canteen)

"Roll up, roll up" - is it time to get out and meet your intranet audience and see what they really think? Image: dhammza

Before we begin: this post is aimed at folks with intranets to run, but I think the lessons can be applied to external sites too...

The beauty of running an intranet is you can easily meet your audience in the flesh, but it can still be easy to hide away in the office and not take advantage of this great opportunity.

A few months ago I was working with the UK Parliament Intranet Team (Maria, Liz, Alex and Ros). They were in the middle of a big piece of work to shift the entire intranet from a department and team structure information architecture to a task based model. And rightly so.

What was so impressive was the level of engagement they had with the intranet´s userbase around Parliament.

The headline event of this consultation was the hosting of a day-long presentation stand in the busy Portculis House (opposite Big Ben) where many MPs have their offices. You know the sort of thing… a few hanging posters, some flyers, free pens…

The aim was to meet the intranet´s users in person and discuss and gather feedback on the upcoming changes.

Afterwards I asked the team why they thought it had gone so well (it clearly had) and if there was anything they would have done differently. These were the key points:

1. Be clear about what you want to achieve

If you´re not focussed on your reasons for setting up a stand you will struggle to get useful feedback. This ambiguity will come across to the visitors at your stand and they´ll be unsure what you expect from them. Focussed examples could be:

• “We want to change the design of the intranet and we need feedback on our prototypes.”
• “We know the HR section of the intranet is not great and we want to find out what our audience need from that section.”

It is important to communicate the purpose of your stand at all stages, from the advertising (email invites, bill-board posters, oral invitations, etc) to the way you start conversations with people at the stand.

There is no harm in spelling it out with a big call to action… at Parliament they had big posters and a great looking scrolling presentation on a TV with words like this: “Use the intranet? Help us improve it by telling  us what tasks you perform.” Most people can get their head around that and give you some useful feedback in 60 secs.

2. Advertise your stand and spread the word

Obvious really, but that is what the guys at Parliament did really well and it made the difference to numbers on the day. This is especially important if you can´t get the busy spots, outside the canteen for example.

You run the intranet so advertise the session on the homepage and make it sound interesting and worth the effort popping along, remembering to be clear about the purpose of the session and who it is aimed at.

And put a bit of pressure on your intranet friends around the organisation to spread the word for you and bring along their colleagues.

3. Time, location, and set-up of your stand

Think carefully about the best day and time of day to run your stand to get the most impact from your effort. That will largely depend on the location of your stand, so using the canteen entrance example it will obviously be best at breakfast and/or lunchtime. Ask the advice of the person who arranges the booking, they will have a good idea.

As for the actual stand, you do need to look the part if you want to be taken seriously. At Parliament they got one of the web designers to knock up a colourful poster design which they had professionally printed. They also had a simple, but professional, scrolling presentation on a big screen to turn heads.

Tip: A really simple, but effective technique is to have a bowl of sweets on the stand. It was amazing how many people at Parliament would come over to get a free lolly. And once they have taken one, you have every right to ask them: “Do you use the intranet…?”

4. Lots of lovely, and not so lovely, feedback

If you ask for feedback, you had better be ready to capture it.

Because the Parliament guys had clear objectives for their stand (What are the most common tasks our intranet users want to perform?) they asked that question on pre-printed forms with a nice big box to scribble the answer in. They had a few more fields to capture the name and audience group of the user, e.g. MP or MP staff, but kept it minimal and focussed. A nice touch was a branded ballot box (fashioned out of a printer paper box and glued on flyers) for folks to cast their completed forms. Very apt for Parliament.

Now not everyone wants to or has the time to fill out a form so try to complete it for them as you talk. Sometimes they may have already left the stand, but capture as much of the useful stuff as possible and pop it on the pile. This isn´t scientific research so don´t get too hung up about completing every field.

By the end of the session you will hopefully have some great data that starts to answer your questions.

You will also get negative feedback, and often warranted. But this is the juicy stuff (mostly) and you have the perfect opportunity to ask them what they think it should be like or why they don´t like something. It can be really tough to publicly open yourself up for criticism, but it´s vital you don´t become defensive and miss the opportunity to better understand your users.

5. Set expectations or it will come back to bite you

If you aren´t careful you will hear this line 6 months after the session: “…I told your team about this months ago and no one has bothered to do anything about it.”

Asking people what they think is not the same as saying: “we are going to act on what you think”. But don´t presume everyone who comes to your stand gets that. Be clear from the start that this is part of a bigger process… you are looking for trends… you are gauging opinion… however you want to say it, don´t let them think you are going to act on everything they say. That would be crazy.

6. Now do something about it

What you do with the findings of the session will depend greatly on what you were trying to find out, but I would suggest these actions:

• have a wash-up meeting with everyone on the stand to discuss how the session went: key themes, immediate concerns, actions (with owners), lessons learnt for next time…
• process the data on the feedback forms ASAP – if your session was trying to identify the most popular tasks on the intranet (as in the Parliament example) run the numbers and pin up the results on the wall for everyone to see
• send round an exec summary of the session to your team and other key people, spelling out what this means and next steps
• get a follow up news item on the intranet homepage thanking those who came along and tease them with some of the findings and what you plan to do with them…  and if you have the time to send these people an email even better

7. Few last tips for running a successful stand

• ask the people who come to your stand if they are willing to be consulted in the future – these are often the perfect people to demo prototypes to or conduct user testing sessions with. Tip: don´t shy away from asking the most critical people, they are often the most rewarding people to work with
• rotate the people on the stand - it gives people a break but it also means more people in the team gain the invaluable experience of meeting users face-to-face (this again worked well at Parliament)
• get your boss along and helping out, sure they are busy, but they need to hear this stuff and it gives the rest of the organisation a good impression of a united team effort supported from the top

If I´m honest, I was actually a bit sceptical when asked to help out on the stand at Parliament and wasn´t convinced it was the best use of my time. But I was wrong. If done properly it is a very efficient way to better understand your intranet, it´s purpose and the people who use it.

As ever, let me know how you get on.

Liam

What’s the plan Stan?

Define your strategic goals (image by evelynishere)

I have often come across organisations that have decided they need a website. When I ask them what functionality they require they will readily reel off a load of internet related buzz-words such as streaming media, personalisation, google maps etc. However, when I ask them what the purpose of the website is and its objectives the answer is often “ummm….”.

This is not surprising really, it’s so easy to get carried away with the thought of new toys to play with and completely overlook the objectives for the site. Indeed, a new website may not be required at all.

Digital media is basically a tool for delivering your business objectives. Your business or organisation will usually have a clearly defined business strategy, so before you even think about your web presence you need to write a web strategy that will help you achieve those goals.

Your web strategy should drive how you use the internet and what tools you use to achieve your goals.

Simply defining your goals is only the first step, your strategy should contain 3 elements…

1. A Goal – What do you want to achieve?
2. A Method – How are you going to achieve your goal?
3. A Measure – How are you going to measure success?

Goal!!

Make sure your goals are technology independent. One of your web strategy goals may be to “increase sales by 10% in a year by improved use of online technology”, it should NOT however be to “create a new website in order to increase sales by 10% in a year”. Your strategy should not mention a particular tool or method, your strategy will determine which tools you use, not the other way around.

If your organisation does not have profit lead goals you can still clearly define what you want to achieve. For example, the NHS may have a goal to “spread information on swine flu to new audiences using digital media”.

Method

Once you have a defined goal or goals you should then be able to work out what methods you will use to achieve those goals. In many cases there will be many digital options open to you. You may decide to use multiple methods or you may decide to focus your efforts on one tool.

So in order to achieve your  goal to “spread information on swine flu to new audiences using digital media”, you may decide to use the following method….

Set up a twitter feed called NHSwineFlu to…

• spread swine flu messages
• highlighting urgent swine flu updates
• respond to events

He shoots, he scores!

Having a strategy is one thing, but how do you know if you have achieved your objectives? With a sales based goal it is relatively easy to measure success, for example by simply seeing whether you have increase sales by 10% in a year after your digital campaign started.

With less tangible goals it is possible to measure success using Key Performance Indicators (KPI). In the case of the NHS the measure of success may be defined in the following KPI’s…

• increase our twitter followers by at least 10% a month (base line this measure)
• achieve an average of 10 click-throughs/messages to any NHS sites the tweets promote.
• Achieve 50 re-tweets a week.

Go for it!

So if you are entering the digital arena for the first time or want to refresh your online prescence think Goal, Method, Measure!

6 steps to a successful web project

Turn your ideas into reality in 6 steps (image by Da Flai)

In this blog I am going to outline the steps I think are required to deliver a successful web project. These steps can be applied to any size of project whether it is simply building a new site or a whole new web platform.

1. Requirements capture and definition. In my opinion this is the most important step of the whole project. Unless you correctly identify the requirements both strategically and functionally, whatever you deliver will ultimately fail and you will have to start again. Techniques such as interviews, workshops, brain storming and brand boards are used to gather requirements. The MoSCoW technique is also very useful for prioritising requirements. I have already blogged about the importance of engaging the end user when requirements gathering, it is also important you work closely with internal stakeholders to draw up a detailed requirements specification.  The requirements specification can then be used to define functional and non-functional requirements. If you are using a technical partner to deliver the platform, you should also specify the performance requirements. It is important that all requirements are clear and unambiguous. Use terms like ’shall’ or ‘will’ rather than ‘may’ or ‘could’. Later you can then use these requirements to help establish Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure the success of the delivered website(s).
2. Design - Once requirements have been defined and specified they can then be used to design the new website(s). This phase includes developing the website Information Architecture (IA) and wireframes of the website. If the project involves new Web Content Management System (WCMS) functionality a functional specification will be developed from the requirements and a training specification to identify what needs to be trained.
3. Build – At this stage all the detailed designs, wireframes, etc are passed to the technical team for development of the platform. You must ensure that the technical team are correctly skilled and experienced to deliver the platform to the required specification and performance. At this stage you should start to plan any required website migration and training. This can be a time consuming stage.
4. Testing – Once the platform has been built it must be thoroughly tested to ensure all requirements are met. This testing should include system testing, performance testing, user acceptance testing and any required penetration testing. You should also ensure any new sites are tested for accessibility and usability.
5. Implementation – Once the platform has been thoroughly tested and signed off you must implement the solution. On a small project this stage will simply involve training, creating content and publishing the new website. On a large-scale project however, this stage could be very complicated and involve website migration, training delivery, website build and launch of many websites.
6. Review and Evaluate – When you have launched your new platform don’t consider the project to be over. It is good practice to review the project process and evaluate it. What went well? What didn’t go well? What would you do differently next time?

This process may look daunting to some, but with the right amount of planning and preparation these steps will provide the structure to allow you to deliver a successful web project.

In future blogs I will look at each of these steps in more detail.

DIY web usability testing

I’m not sure why, but website usability testing is often seen as something beyond the remit or experience of web teams.

I simply don’t buy this. I think anyone can run these sessions for nothing and come away with great insights that’ll improve their site.

Usability testing on 10 Cents pence a day

My user testing sessions are based on Steve Krug’s fantastic Usability testing on 10 cents a day guide. I really recommend you download it: 16 pages that changed my whole view on what’s possible with DIY usability testing.

The gist is: user testing can be a cheap, painless and highly rewarding exercise when it is run by the people who run the website.

Run your own usability test session

If you don’t do any usability testing or use a third party to do it, please give this a go. It’ll take about two hours to prep and perform. I’m confident you will feel it was time well spent.

Pick your audience

You should already know who your target audiences are. Pick one to test. I’ll go back to my Foreign Office days and pick British holiday makers for this example.

Now list the 3-5 most common tasks they come to your site to do. In my example:

• Task 1: get the latest travel advice info for the country they’re going to
• Task 2: contact the British Embassy for help because something has gone wrong abroad
• Task 3: get a replacement passport because it has been stolen while on holiday

Recruit your guinea pig

Invite a (non-web team) colleague or a friend at a loose end for a 45 mins session. Try to choose someone who is articulate and easy going.

Ok, ideally you want to test with someone from your target audience – a ‘real’ end user – but I don’t think this really makes much difference when you’re starting out. Once you have an established usability testing programme in place which has already identified the big problems with your site, then it may be worth paying an agency to hire these ‘real’ users.

You need a ‘Test Lab’

Book a room with a networked PC and three chairs. And that’s it! You’ll survive without the eye motion tracking camera for now.

Ask another colleague to observe and take notes of anything significant (you’ll be busy leading the session).

Tip: Try to get the person responsible for the areas you’re testing to be your note taker – they need to see this with their own eyes. In my example: I would (and did) invite the Head of the Travel Advice web team to do this.

Video recording the session can be really worthwhile – a 60 secs compilation of the best / worst bits can have real impact on other web team colleagues. But don’t get hung up about doing this for the first session. If you do record the session make sure the note taker marks the time on the camera with their notes – it saves a lot of time later.

Get into the room 15 mins early to check everything is working ok and the chairs are arranged – two at the PC for you and the guinea pig and one a few metres behind for the note taker.

Running the session

I think the key to having a successful session is ensuring your guinea pig is comfortable with the situation and understands what is and isn’t required of them. Let’s be honest, it is a pretty artificial situation.

I try to introduce sessions with these points:

• I will ask you to try and perform some common tasks
• I need you to think out loud as you perform the tasks. Example: “I think I want to click this link here because it has the word passports in it.” Some people find this quite weird to do and may need prompting if they go quiet
• I’m not trying to test you – I want to see where you are having problems because that will help us to improve the site for real users
• I want you to be honest about your experience and not to worry about offending anyone if you want to be critical

Ease them in with a simple task and then work through the tasks on your list until your time is up. I wouldn’t recommend any more than 45 mins.

At times they’ll get stuck and confused, but try not to jump in with the answer, no other user has the benefit of your knowledge when they come to your site.

And if they go off on some unlikely journey to complete a task, let them, just ensure they continue to think out loud so you know why they’re doing what they’re doing.

Hopefully you will find it really enlightening and gain some important insights into the usability of your website. I’ve never run a session that didn’t identify issues – often things you would never expect unless you had seen them with your own eyes.

The key is to capture what you’ve witnessed, make sense of it and its significance and work out what you need to do about it. That’s when the real work starts!

Oh, and don’t forget to buy your guinea pig lunch as a thank you.

Let me know how you get on.

Liam

It’s good to talk… web

Give your web team regular opportunity to have a good old natter

When I was in the UK Foreign Office web team, Stephen Hale (now Head of Digital Diplomacy) introduced an informal weekly workshop for the team to get together and mull over all things web.

The regular slot was an open invite and members of the team were encouraged to take turns leading the session with a topic of their choice.

Topics ranged from QR codes to RDFa and the sessions were used to think through how these techs could be best used by the Foreign Office.

The idea was not to come out of the sessions with a bunch of actions, but to get the team collectively discussing, contemplating and enthusing about the possibilities ahead of us.

The usual format was an informal 5-10 mins show-and-tell of the technology or tool to set up a few discussion points and then it was turned over to the rest of the team to thrash it out.

I really enjoyed those sessions and think the concept would work well in other web teams:

1. it stimulates a web team to keep looking forwards, to get excited about the possible opportunities
2. it gets the team working together to develop new ideas and can breakdown the usual hierarchies – great for morale
3. it gives individuals the opportunity to share their ideas, knowledge and learning with the rest of the team
4. and perhaps most importantly… it’s a great way for junior and less confident members of a team to showcase themselves and their ideas. It would be easy to add this to someone’s job development plan (or equivalent)

By making this a regular fixture you know there will be a fresh flow of ideas circulating in your team and less chance of good ideas slipping by unnoticed.

I know this isn’t the most efficient way of developing ideas and you lose the combined productivity of your whole team for 45 mins every week or so. That may be hard to justify, especially during busy periods.

But you will come up with great stuff and most importantly, you will do it as a team.

Try it with your team

Stick a recurring invite in everyone’s calendar for a 45 mins session (should be enough). It can be hard to find a good time in the week, but best to have it when people will fancy a break from their desks – friday afternoons perhaps.

Volunteer to lead the first session and pick a topic that will catch their attention – something less conventional to make it clear that anything goes. Personally I don’t think there should be any expectation that a session topic should be adopted and delivered – this should not be the time to talk about something that is already on the cards.

Book a comfortable room, not the one you use for all your regular team meetings.  Even better, go outside if the weather is being kind. This is bean bag time!

And off you go. Hopefully you will have a good turn out and a lively discussion.

I would recommend getting at least one action from the first session: agree who will lead the second one. You don’t want to lose the momentum, or end up leading it every week.

And a final thought: once you get up and running, why not invite others from outside your web team (internal and external), maybe even to lead a session.

Getting ‘outsiders’ along is an excellent way of showcasing the ideas, creativity, enthusiasm and value of your team. This is something web teams often need to improve at.

As always, let me know how you get on.

Liam

Managing content – go with the flow!

Workflow can help you control your content - photo by muha...

When managing many sites and many webmasters it is important to maintain control of your content. At the FCO we have over 250 websites and 300 webmasters. It is impossible to keep track of all these sites and webmasters ourselves but workflow allows us to control access to creating and publishing content.

Wikipedia provides a good definition of workflow – “A workflow is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.”

When combined with user access restrictions, workflow can give you peace of mind that content is being created, edited, reviewed and published by the right groups of people.

Here are my golden rules for designing a web workflow…

1. Workflow is an interpretation of the required business processes. You must fully understand the business processes required before you attempt to interpret them into a technical workflow solution.
2. Keep it as simple as possible – editors and managers need to understand how it works.
3. Make it adaptable – a single workflow should be able to adapt to all required editorial processes.

In my experience a simple 4 step workflow can cover almost any combination of business processes

This is a circular workflow from new through to archived and then back to new.

New – This is the status at which content is created and edited. Members of this group are able to create new content and pass to review status.

Review – At this status a manager can review the content and either pass it through to published status or reject it back to the new status.

Published – At this stage content is live on the website. From this status content can be pushed to archived status, this will remove the content from the live site. Alternatively, an editor can move the content back to new status. This means the content will remain live on the site while changes are made.  The page is then passed back through workflow to published therefore replacing the original content.

Archived – Once moved to this stage content is removed from the website. This content can then be edited and pushed back through workflow to published status.

Hopefully this will give you a bit or a head start when planning access to your content.

Comments welcome!

What’s the best way to present the web?

The web is a visual medium, so present it that way

In my experience web teams often need to get out and about to explain what they can do for an organisation. And so we should!

But what’s the best way to present our ideas about the web to bosses and colleagues?

Should our approach be any different to presentations from other teams?

I’ve just read a great blog post from Steph Gray about what it takes to present ideas about the web.

Quick plug: If you don’t know Steph Gray, I recommend you change that by subscribing to his blog. Steph is someone in e-Government who really knows what he’s talking about with lessons and thoughts that are relevant well beyond Whitehall.

Anyway, plug over and back to this post…

In Steph’s post he rightly says: ‘…Make sure you have a bunch of material from which you can tell stories selectively, rather than needing to build a grand argument slide by slide. In Powerpoint, you could have a structure which lets you jump to slides from a master page using hyperlinks.’

That got me thinking.

You do the web, so present like the web

Two years ago (or so) David Miliband became Foreign Secretary. At the time I worked in the FCO’s Web Team and we were pretty excited by his appointment. This was a Minister who knew the potential of the web, his Defra blog was something of a Whitehall rarity. We knew our web stock was going to rise.

After a few months we were invited to present to him and his advisors about our vision / strategy / ideas for how the FCO could or should use the web in its work. Four of us, including Stephen Hale (now Head of Online Engagement at the FCO), got busy pulling together the things we wanted to discuss, and more importantly, the things we wanted to get a green light on.

Keep it visual and interactive (like the web)

We knew we didn’t want do deliver a standard 10 (ordered) slide presentation. A few months into the job he must have been sick of PowerPoint presentations.

So we made the presentation into an actual website. In truth it was a bunch of exported images from Fireworks with clickable hotspots, but to anyone else it looked, felt and behaved like a website.

So we had our homepage which had big graphic links to the key themes… ‘Flickr, Youtube, Blogs, Google Maps’… in hindsight we were definitely too tool focussed, but you live and learn! Each linked to a ’section’ homepage which had links to screenshots of third party examples such as Obama Girl on Youtube, key facts and stats, and our own interactive protypes for how the FCO could use these tools.

We wanted it to be as visual as possible and not rely on spoken explanations. Sure enough, it was so much easier to explain how Flickr could be used by clicking through an interactive prototype.

Anyway, to cut a long story short we went on to deliver most of the ideas we pitched that day including the FCO Youtube and Flickr channels, policy Google Map, and the successful FCO blog platform. These tools are commonly used across Whitehall now, but not so back then.

A web approach can make the difference

Benefits of this approach:

• you can quickly navigate to anywhere in the ’site’ in response to the flow of conversation
• you don’t have to modify your presentation for a different audience or time length – you just go to the bits you need
• it is much more interesting to look at – you keep your audience’s attention
• it demonstrates you can actually do what you are talking about
• feels real – if you’re asked “is this real then?” you know you’re on to a winner, you almost want your audience to be disappointed that it doesn’t actually exist yet… you’ve got them excited about what’s possible.

Drawbacks:

• it can take time to get right – it is important to create templates in your graphics package with the header etc to reuse for each page
• may be overkill for the situation
• you may lose structure to your presentation if you dart from one section to another – be clear before you go in what you want to get out of the session to help avoid this
• requires a reasonable amount of ability in the graphics package of your choice
• the more links and interactivity you have the more to go wrong – test it to destruction

Play to your strengths

I’m certainly not trying to say it was all down to the way we presented those ideas, but I do know that using that format played to our natural strengths as webbies.

We were far more comfortable navigating through a website than an alien PowerPoint format and that allowed us to convey the passion and imagination we clearly had for the topic.

And we also knew our approach would make the experience something a bit different for our audience, nothing radical, but enough to make us stand out and get our point across.

Try this now

I like to finish my posts with something you can have a go at.

Steph mentions Prezi in his post. I’ll put my hands up and say I’d never heard of it, but love what I’ve seen.

I won’t say any more, but if you have been interested by the ideas in this post I’d recommend you take 5 mins to try the Prezi demo version.

It’s certainly inspired me – bring on the next scary presentation.

As always let me know what you think.

Putting social network traffic on the map

If you want to monitor social media networks, there’s a wealth of free tools out there to tell you how many people are using what #tags on Twitter when and such like but one issue that UK application developers have yet to solve is how we, as British web people, filter out traffic and chatter from elsewhere.

Monitoring matters!

I’ve been doing some social media mapping on swine flu – trying to gauge the public’s mood – to foretell whether they are about to rush to the supermarket en masse, stock up on tinned beans and hibernate or whether they’re still going out, getting drunk, sharing saliva with strangers and comprehensively ignoring government hygiene advice. Such information helps organisations like the Department of Health target messaging effectively.

Following the trend

So yesterday I watched as ’swine flu’ loitered in the trending topics between the like of ‘Cristiano Ronaldo‘ and ‘Real Madrid’….I assumed that most of the English Ronaldo-related chatter would be from the UK, so the fact that swine flu, which is from everywhere, was not beating this in the trending topics led me to summarise that despite the WHO being on the brink of declaring a pandemic, the UK was more shocked at Real Madrid paying £80 million for that arrogant **** (I’m a Liverpool fan….)

If you want more detail though, searching for terms like ’swine flu’ amongst the daily din of chatter chucks up a diatribe of results from all over the English-speaking world. There’s the occasional ‘blimey gosh’ or ‘wassup’ that helps indicate what nationality the tweeter is, but you’re doing a quick trawl on a dashboard like Netvibes there is no way you can check such info.

Advanced searching

Twitter’s advanced search enables you to search tweets from a radius of a specified location, however entering United Kingdom does not produce all the UK’s tweets  – users don’t tend to put ‘uk’ in their location, they usually just out their home town – great if you’re monitoring a campaign in a small local area, but not nationwide.

One way of overcoming this is to whack in somewhere smack in the middle of Britain, like Leicester, and extending to the radius to 500 miles (specify English text only!). But still, how many users actually specify their location?

I’ve found some great tools for monitoring trending topics like Tweetstats and Twirl which are certainly useful, but so far I’ve yet to find a UK-made tool which shows traffic from the UK.

And that’s just Twitter! As for Facebook, the Lexicon tool seems about as good as it gets, but still no geographical segmentation available.

I’d love to hear whether anyone has found a more effective way of doing this.

Perhaps things will change with the arrival of the UK-made Audioboo…and at least that has the benefit of accents!

Taking the bounce out of bounce rates – part #1

There's more to bounce rates than your homepage. Photo by Aldo Risolvo.

Do you know which pages your visitors first see when they come to your website (other than your homepage of course)?

And do you know how many of those lovely visitors actually stick around long enough to do anything?

In my experience many web teams and managers don’t really know the answers to these important questions. And yes… I’m guilty of this too.

Bounces are missed opportunities. At worse they indicate poor user experience – the sort that damages the reputation of your site, brand and organisation. So not good.

This is the first of two posts that will look into bounce rates and ways to improve the retention of visitors to your site.

Not really sure what all this bounce rate talk is? Wikipedia has a pretty good definition of bounce rates.

Try this now: identify your bouncing pages

In 5 mins you will have a much better idea of where folks are arriving (and quickly departing) from your site. That doesn’t solve the problem but it will trigger a bunch of actions to start reversing this unwelcome trend. We’ll look into some of these in part #2.

Open up your stats package and run the most popular entry page report over the last few months – any decent stats package will have some variation of this. If your pacakge doesn’t I suggest you start using Google Analytics – it’s free, easy and bloody brilliant.

It’s this report in Google Analytics: Content > Top Landing Pages. It even includes the bounce rate for the top pages. Got to love Google!

Ok… no prizes for guessing which page is #1 – your homepage. Well forget about that for now, it’s had enough of your loving care and attention.

What about the other pages on the list? Are they what you expected? These pages are so important to you – they can make or break the user experience. Do any of them have a horrible looking bounce rate?

What’s a good/bad bounce rate?

I really don’t have a definitive answer to this – how long is a piece of string. I’ve read that 50% is pretty normal, but it will vary from site to site and page to page. The important thing is you start to bring that number down.

Tip: get the avg bounce rate for your entire site to see which pages are above avg.

Which pages deserve your attention?

The easy thing to do is list the top 10 or 20 pages with the worst bounce rates and tackle them first.

But which is worse?

a) a page where 20% of site visits begin with a bounce rate of 65%
b) or a page where 2% of site visits begin with a bounce rate of 90%

I would argue (a), because far more visitors are actually bouncing from this page (even if the bounce rate percentage is lower).

The point is: you have limited time and you need to spend it where you will make the most impact.

From this quick excercise you will probably have a list of 2 or 3 popular entry pages with worryingly high bounce rates. These are the pages to focus on first.

Coming up in Part #2

Part #2 will focus on what can be done with these pages to dig a bit deeper into why they are bouncing so much and actions you can take to reverse this trend.

Stay posted. And as ever… let me know what you think.

Web Content Management Systems – Do I need one?

Will a WCMS help you manage your content? By Evil Erin.

I have worked with web content management systems (WCMS) for a long time now. To me they are an essential tool for any large organisation wanting to manage lots of websites and content. I have always been surprised by the number of web professionals I have met who either don’t understand what a WCMS is for or cannot see any benefit to using one.

So I thought it might be useful to answer the following questions…

What is a WCMS?

It does exactly what it says on the tin. The purpose of a WCMS is to manage and share content across multiple websites. It’s that simple. A WCMS allows web editors to publish content across multiple sites,  control that content, and control editorial access to it.

So what is it good at then?

• Controlling editorial access – A WCMS is great for controlling access to particular sites, access to part of a particular site, or access to particular types of content. You only want your press office to create press releases? No problemo.
• Controlling publishing – You don’t want your press officer to publish a press release before the Press Office manager has approved it? Easy, WCMS systems use workflow to manage user roles.
• Sharing content – You want to add the same web page to 230 websites? Not a problem with a WCMS.
• Presentation Control – WCMS’s allow you to control how content is used and where it can be displayed with page templates. For example, Press releases can only appear on a newsroom template.
• No techie skills required – A WCMS allows web editors to create content without any web technical expertise whatsoever. HTML? Never heard of it guv’nor.
• Quickly create new sites – Give me the site name, hit a button and ta-da! New site created.
• Improved performance – Most WCMS systems allow techie types to easily optimise performance across your web platform.
• Reusing content – Want an image of a car? The chances are there is already one loaded into the WCMS, just search the repository for the car image rather than having to find a new image.
• Enforcing standards – More control! Your sites need to be W3C AA compliant? Easy, just ensure your WCMS templates and stylesheets comply and all your sites will comply.
• Previewing content – Want to see your content in-context before the rest of the world can see it? Just preview your content before it is published to the rest of the world.

It sounds great, what’s the catch?

• Flexibility – A press release can only be displayed on a newsroom, remember? Want a press release on the homepage? That’ll be an update to the page template then. If you need lots of  quick tweeks to design and functionality a WCMS will really slow this down.
• Frustrating for editors – If your editors are used to editing HTML directly using dreamweaver they will find a WCMS very frustrating because of the limitations it places on them. They cannot edit HTML like they used to.
• It takes time to implement – Implementing a WCMS in a large organisation can be a very time consuming business.
• Slows progress – The internet is a very fast moving environment these days. New technology and innovations arrive all the time. A WCMS does not lend itself well to keeping pace with these new developments.
• Can be slow to add content – Most WCMS systems treat every web page element as a separate bit of content. Your page contains 5 images and 10 links? You had better create 5 image content types and 5 links in the WCMS then!
• Training – Got 200 editors across the globe? Someone will rack up the airmiles to train them. That’ll cost you!
• Lose the WCMS, lose all your sites! – If the WCMS fails or the database behind it fails you could potentially lose all your sites.
• Is it overkill? – If you only have 5 small sites and 10 HTML editors there is little point implementing a WCMS. A WCMS works best when you have many sites and editors and lots of content.
• Not great for SEO – Generally WCMS systems are not great at search engine optimisation.
• Cost – I am sure I have mentioned cost before?! Ouch, they can cost a lot!

Have I missed anything? Let me know!

You may have noticed that I used the word “control” several times in the “good at” area. That word really sums up what a WCMS offers organisations.  Editorial, presentation and publishing control of web content. Combine that with the lack of technical expertise required and the ability to easily share and reuse content across many sites and you have a powerful tool that will be invaluable to many large organisation.

If however, your company requires maximum flexibility and costs are an issue, think long and hard before investing in a WCMS.