New Website: Progress Report
It has been almost three months since we launched our new Extension website on June 27, 2018. So how is it doing? How do we measure the "success" of a new website?This post will show some of the metrics we are using to know if our website is living up to our expectations and where we need to focus our future efforts.
First, our original goals for the new website were:
- Content is fresh and relevant
- Easier/better search options
- Site is 100% mobile-friendly
- Content is tailored to the intended audience
- Re-organized navigation
- Highly visual design
- Pages are 100% accessible to all
- Users are invited to take action
- Easier for educators/teams to update information
The Basics
We went from 7,000 pages to 3,900 pages. This was part of our effort to refocus our website on our most relevant and fresh content. It is also a result of combining pages into longer pages, based on research that has shown this is a preference of many web users. As we continue to improve our content and organization, we actually expect total page number to decrease even more.Every page is mobile friendly, even on the blogs. This is a top priority of our web redesign, since over half our visitors are on a mobile device.
The search works well and we get few complaints about it. However, search is a tough thing to complain about: you have to know something is there to know it's not showing up properly! So we suspect there are many things on the back end we could be doing to tweak results for the ease of our users. This is on our list for the coming months.
Pageviews have increased on a per page basis. However, with fewer pages overall, we expected and saw a decrease in overall pageviews.
Site Surveys: The voice of our users
You may have noticed the "Feedback" tab on the right edge of our website when viewed on a desktop. Or maybe you've noticed the pop-up site exit survey? Both of these are examples of an add-on tool for Qualtrics that easily allows us to embed surveys into our website. It records not only feedback, but also a user's path through our site before they submit the survey. We have received over 2,000 responses. Every single one has been read and coded and this information has been invaluable to us as we prioritize bug fixes and content addition!For example, when we got many feedback forms from Master Gardeners, all saying they can't find where to log their hours, we were able to see where they had looked expecting to find that link on the site, and then we put a huge alert on that page.
Our overall feedback "rating" by users, asked in the form of a question, "How likely are you to recommend us to your friends or colleagues?" has increased 20 points (out of 100) on the new website.
Accessibility
Accessible pages are a top priority on our website. Being compliant with accessibility standards means your site can be read by visually impaired users, from blind to colorblind, and navigated by people who may have limited mobility with a mouse, and also helps users with slow internet connections to be able to view content. Accessible websites are not optional from a public institution, and we took this priority very seriously.Even including our current challenges to make fully accessible PDFs, we absolutely nailed it on this priority. Our accessibility errors are down 83% over our old site.
Broken Links
High quality content includes functioning links and no
I hope you've enjoyed this progress report on the new website. Is there anything about the new website that you're wondering about that I could try to answer?
We have many more exciting plans for our website, and will continue to post behind-the-scenes looks on Extension Quick Bytes!
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