The Value of Content Sharing
One new feature on the redesigned site, which will be located in the left navigation column, is a new Add This widget, which will allow Web visitors to easily share content with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter or via e-mail. If content can be more easily shared then it should increase traffic to our Web site and improve our search traffic. At least that is the objective.
If you read any popular blogs or online news sites, you’ve likely seen these sharing links at the bottom of an article. I’ve grown to really like these sharing features as it makes sending Web content to colleagues and friends a whole lot easier.
One popular sharing tool provider Share This recently published some interesting statistics on their blog on the value of content sharing. They note that e-mail still matters. Sharing content by e-mail made up the largest percentage of shares comprising some 46 percent.
“Despite reports of its demise, e-mail is still the most popular method of sharing, and despite its meteoric rise of late, Twitter is still not a very popular sharing channel. In our research, we found that 46 percent of shares came via e-mail, 33 percent from Facebook, 14 percent from other channels such as Digg, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, etc., and just 6 percent from Twitter.”
In the same blog post, Share This included data from their network of publishers that highlighted content sharing’s impact on overall site traffic, search traffic, and visitor engagement.
Sharing vs. Search
Many of [ShareThis's] publishers are seeing increasing results from sharing. Here are a few network-wide observations…
- Sharing can make up 5-10% of your overall traffic.
- Sharing can make up 15-30% of your search traffic.
- Sharing drives 25-50% more engagement (page views/unique) than search.
An additional benefit of using a sharing widget on our own site is the built-in analytics capability, which will allow us to see what content is being shared across our Web site.
Knee Deep in Web Content, Among Other Updates
We are spending much of our time these days writing content for the new site. This includes writing many profiles for the new “Faces” faculty, student, and alumni Flash piece, a bank of stories for the new home page’s Wall gallery, and content for the many new pages we will be adding to the site. It’s all hands on deck for the Communications and Marketing staff as each member of our office is writing Web profies. We’re also gearing up to have a handful of students to assist us during winter break with pulling content out of our current Web site and readying it so it can be easily posted in the new CMS.
Should We Use Underscores or Hyphens in URLs?
As part of our implementation of Ingeniux CMS, we’ve had to decide how we want URLs to read (i.e., how will the page name read in a browser’s address bar).
Out of the box, Ingeniux displays page URLs as numbers with an .xml extension (e.g., 345.xml). Although, this method is short and clean, numbers aren’t real memorable. It’s much easier for site visitors to remember academics.html or news.html than 345.xml. You have some inclination where academics.html will take you when clicked, whereas 345.xml is pretty vague.
To present more human-readable URLs, Ingeniux allows us to utilize structured URLs using a hyphen or an underscore as a separator and specify .htm or .html as an extension. So which is better, hyphens or underscores? For me it has always come down to usability, something we touch on during each CMS training. It is much easier to read a Web address done in hyphens than underscores, especially when including URLs in print. If URLs appear as underlined text, the underscores are often harder to read.
When it comes down to it, search engines treat both underscores and hyphens differently. Google for example treats hyphens as separators or dividers while underscores are not treated as such as shown below.
Underscores vs. Hyphens
Example 1: www.anselm.edu/my_web_page.html
Example 2: www.anselm.edu/my-web-page.html
How Google reads these URLs.
Example 1: mywebpage
Example 2: my web page
Changes Regarding Web Site Update Requests
Early this week the campus was notified via an all-campus e-mail that the Web staff would be “unable to take on any new Web projects from November though January” given that we are in the home stretch of the redesign project.
We will continue to perform Web updates on the site that are important or critical to the business of the college. But we will push off those updates that are of a less critical nature so we can focus our full attention on the new Web site.
This is by no means an odd thing. Michael Stoner (mStoner) wrote a great post on his blog this week entitled “Timing is Everything,” which offers some insight into the amount of time it can take to redesign or redevelop a college Web site. It’s a good read and offers some details on the experiences of a few colleges that have gone through recent redesigns. And just to reference one sentence in his post, Saint Anselm is “redeveloping” its Web site (its much more than a redesign). We are deploying new CMS technology, introducing new functionality and content, and redesigning the look and feel of our site. So our project time frame has been on the longer side.
A New and Improved Search Engine
One of the most requested new Web site features we heard from faculty, staff, and students during our redesign discovery process was improved search. To paraphrase some of the comments we heard – “when I search the college site I get a bunch of results that have nothing to do with what I’m searching for.”
So one of the priorities of the redesign project was to improve site search. So after looking at several different options, we purchased a Google Mini search appliance, which arrived in the mail this week from Google.
Web Usability Testing of Current and Prospective Students
This week we are conducting Web usability testing on the new site design with current and prospective students. We had two people from BarkleyREI on campus on Tuesday to test the new site with current students and we are testing prospective students at BarkleyREI’s headquarters in Pittsburgh throughout the week.
Before I get into it, I suppose I should explain what usability testing is and why we are doing it (and why it is really important). Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen describes usability testing as “a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word “usability” also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process.”
The aim of our usability testing is to evaluate the new Web site design and information architecture with end users. Up until this point we’ve followed industry best practices in developing our site strategy, the site’s information architecture, and in designing the user interface for the site. So each step of the way we’ve made numerous assumptions and usability testing allows use to get direct input on how real users of the site think and respond to the design, content, and how we’ve organized the site. Does the site meet it’s intended purposes, what is its ease of use (in particular sections or as a whole), are users in each group able to complete expected site tasks, are we seeing any trends from one user test to the next.
Level Page Design Comps
Since the approval of the new home page design, we’ve been working with BarkleyREI on designs for lower level page templates. You will see several recognizable design elements that are being carried over from the new college home page design — the color palette, the blue page background gradient, header and global navigation, and the super footer.
Please keep in mind that the photos used in these design comps are only placeholders as is the Latin text used for filler. Also, we’ve overfilled the right sidebar to show multiple options available for displaying column call outs.
At this stage, BarkleyREI presented us with two unique design approaches for the level page templates. One design saw the color red introduced to the color palette (the same red used on the current site). After seeking feedback from several offices, we decided that the introduction of red to the color palette was a sharp departure from the color palette used for the new home page. So we have stayed with a mostly blue color palette in the level page designs.
New Home Page Design Concept
After more than a month of work, multiple design concepts and revisions, and input from prospective students and many staff and administrators from across the college, we are pleased to unveil the new Saint Anselm College home page design.
During this stage in the project, BarkleyREI presented us with four distinct home page concepts for review. Each concept featured a Flash multimedia area at the center of the home page focused on telling stories using video, photo/audio slide shows, and photo galleries. Based on the feedback we gathered during the initial review of the four design concepts, we narrowed our choice to a single design, what we are calling “The Wall” concept. We then made changes to the design’s final color palette, the number of stories presented, interactive elements, font sizes, logo treatment, etc.
Home Page Wireframe, Site Map, and Content Outline
Over the course of last month and half we’ve been hard at work on several fronts with the redesign project. First, we worked with BarkleyREI to finalize the information architecture (aka site map) for the college site. We also completed the site content outline, which is a more comprehensive outline of the site’s higher level pages with detailed notes.
Lastly, we completed work on the home page wireframe, a visual representation of the home page we finish before we begin any design work. The wireframe defines what will go on the home page, including primary, secondary, and tertiary navigation, footer, call outs, search box, news and calendar listings, and multimedia features. Over the course of this work we sought and received input from several offices and have appreciated their feedback.
Overcoming Silos
Early on in our redesign project when we were selecting a Web firm, we received feedback from several companies that our Web site information architecture was strong, but was very siloed. We spend a lot of time on our current Web site directing visitors to one department or another for Web information. The thing to keep in mind is that our Web visitors should not have to learn our organizational structure to find information about us. With this in mind, we spent a lot of time developing the site’s information architecture to have it be more topic based and building stronger landing pages for the site’s target audiences – current students, parents and families, alumni, businesses and community, and faculty and staff.
It’s important to note that the primary audience for the college Web site is prospective students, an external audience that is least familiar with the college’s organizational structure and an audience where topic-based navigation is a better approach.
Next Steps
With the home page wireframe, content outline, and site map now complete, we now move on to the next project priorities:
- Home page design concepts - BarkleyREI will present us with four design concepts for review
- Lower level wireframes – defining what will be included on all landing pages and major sites linked off the college home page
- Content migration tracker – a spreadsheet tracking all content that will be migrated from the current site to the new site
- Site application inventory - an inventory of all scripts, applications, and forms that will carry over to the new site and require development or template skinning
- Ingeniux application handling - Determine which applications and functionality will be handled within the Ingeniux CMS and those that will require custom development.
We also recently installed a new CMS export tool on our Web server that will allow us to easily export all current CMS content as plain text in a directory structure. Pages in the new CMS will be coded to XHTML Transitional, so much of the formating on our current site will be stripped out to remain complaint with the new document type.
Ingeniux Selected as New Content Management System
I’m pleased to announce that we have selected Ingeniux as our new content management system (CMS). The selection comes after nearly eight weeks of work and with considerable assistance and input from our Web vendor, BarkleyREI, and the CMS Selection Group, which included staff, faculty, and student representation.
The CMS finalists were Ingeniux (based in Seattle) and Hannon Hill (based in Atlanta). Both CMSs have a strong foothold in the higher education space with hundreds of college implementations between the two companies. Both CMS companies spent a full day on campus in April where they met with the Web staff, key staff from Information Technology, and provided two-hour demos of their CMSs in front of our selection group.
We started the CMS selection process with a clear understanding of our CMS functional requirements and objectives. These were communicated early on in the Web redesign project in the original RFP and then again during the CMS selection process. Both vendors submitted full proposals, which covered in detail how they matched up against our functional requirements. Their on-site demos also addressed how each product addressed our requirements. Both Hannon Hill and Ingeniux met most of these requirements, but in the end, Ingeniux came out on top. Read more