What's new on Extension.umn.edu?

 It's been a while since we had a post about the main Extension.umn.edu website, and we've been making some exciting updates!

Web Traffic to Extension.umn.edu

First, I think it is interesting to note that traffic on the main Extension is through the roof this year. We have 7.2M pageviews since January 1, up 55% compared to the same period last year. 

(the noticeable spike in the middle of both springs is Easter, we always get traffic on the hard boiling eggs page)

Ten pages with the most increase in traffic this year over last year are:

1. Tomato hornworms in home gardens
2. Watering newly planted trees and shrubs
3. Growing and caring for amaryllis
4. Growing grapes in the home garden
5. Leaf spot diseases of trees and shrubs
6. Larder beetles
7. Pantry pests: Insects found in stored food
8. Squash bugs in home gardens
9. What to do with lawn clippings
10. Five factors of soil formation

The top downloads, with over 14,000 hits, are the various docs for Recommended Trees for Minnesota.

Most of our users are using mobile devices (62%), and most come in through a search engine (78%), which is about the same as last year. Notably, we have not seen any real bump on our county & local Extension sites.

I'd be really curious if all big web sites experienced a bump in traffic, with people at home due to quarantine just having more time to browse around. Or if our site is especially effected, being suited to at-home activities like gardening and wondering what insect you just found.

In addition to puzzling over interesting analytics (which I could do all day!), our web team has been busy making some improvements to our sites.

Site Improvements

We have done a bit of an overhaul on the Courses tab of the main site. A lot of it was under the hood, but you may notice performance upgrades like faster searching, better indexing of short but important words (like Ag and 4-H!), and more logical search result order.

Some other interesting changes in this area include changing the "Event Type" options to include two frequently searched for terms, "free" and "conference." 

We also expanded terminology options for use by online events. We can be more specific now, specifying an online event as a Webinar, Webinar series, Online course, or Self-guided online course. 

We cleaned up and simplified the advanced search panel and we also moved it to the left column (it used to be across the top). Similarly, we simplified the event information pages by removing lesser used items (including the whole right sidebar).

We added related "Upcoming Events" which can be specified or left to default when posting an event. And there's an "Add to Calendar" link now for user convenience.

What's Next?

One big interesting thing the web team has been focusing on this summer is the planning and development of a replacement for Extension's current local/county sites. These are due for replacement next summer, but we are aiming for an earlier launch so as not to cut anything too close. We have chosen to merge these sites into the main Extension site, simplifying all kinds of issues around news and events across two sites. It will be fun to keep you posted as these progress.

Want a sneak peek? 

We are also chugging away on replacing the Intranet, which is built on the same tech as the local/county sites and needs replacing in the coming year.

I hope you and your audiences are getting what they need from the Extension Web Team. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have a web request, challenge, or idea!