cleaning house

If you have a lot of content on your site (and hopefully you do – a lot of content that your target audience would consider valuable and helpful), have you conducted a content inventory? How do you present your content so that it’s easy to find, so that it engages your audience and gets them to keep coming back?

We recently revamped our main developer resource section of our website, called the Oxygen Tank Library. Here is a screen capture of the front page:

The changes are in line with the rest of our wso2.org site overhaul, which involved simplifying and cleaning up the overall look and content. Instead of a long list of every single resource that had been published lately, in chronological order, we’ve categorized the content into presentation type, and included more search options. This is better because a user can search for resources by product name, by certain predetermined technology keywords, or using a built-in google search box. Or, the user can browse all webinars, podcasts, flash demos, articles, and more.

So how is this new design working out for us? I’ve compared the first full month post-changes, to a full month prior to the holidays (the calendar month prior to the changes involved Christmas and New Year’s holidays, which would skew the data somewhat).

• Views of the Library home page are up 285%
• Time spent within the Library is up 20% on average
• The exit rate has dropped 10%
• We’ve broken our own record for number of single visitors in a given day

I’d say it’s working fairly well so far!  We are still fine-tuning this of course, making it possible to preview certain types of content (especially articles; we have more technical articles than other types of multimedia content, and want to reflect this relative weighting somehow on the front page).

This was a huge undertaking, but our marketing manager who owned the project took a few key steps to ensuring success.  To summarize some of the things we learned:

1. The first step is content inventory – what types of content, what topics, and how do they map to specific segments of your target audience?
2. Figure out the common use-case scenarios.  Do most people arrive at the site by referrals from google, directed to specific technical articles?  Or do they arrive from a banner ad campaign dropping them on the front page?  Make sure you have a path to get them from the entry point deeper into the site.
3. Meet with any internal stake holders from the beginning.  We met with our Director of Engineering (since this is a site that supports all the developers, project development, etc), to make sure we had consensus for the changes being made.  We also involved development team leads and business development managers in various stages of the design process.
4. Even when you go live, the project isn’t “finished”.  Keep tracking the analytics, and be open to feedback.  We’ve made several changes to the usability of the Library after the launch.