Website report 18 July 08
We're still watching hits quite carefully, after the web redesign. Our internal hits records show visits up on last year, Google analytics shows them down for the month, though about the same this last week. We have about a third less pages on the new site, so we would expect page hits to go down, but visits is more worrying. It's possible that some of the drop in Google is due to settings excluding internal traffic working better, but it's hard to tell exactly as these settings can't be applied retrospectively, and I've been fiddling with them quite a lot. For the moment we are cautiously optimistic.
Our status on Google does seem to have dropped as a result of page changes: we're addressing that with page redirects wherever we spot a problem, and of course the sitemap is regularly submitted, so that should climb back up. Visits from Google are down 5% at present.
One thing that does seem clear on both Google and internal records is that factsheet hits have gone up a lot, and that course enquiries are reasonable. We still have some reports of the layout malfunctioning. It's been tested fully on Browsercam, and there are css issues with IE before v5.5 on the homepage (a lot of white space between items). However as IE 5.5 and earlier comprise less than o.2% of hits it's not at once a top priority. The layout has been adjusted since launch to make it more flexible: most of the page dimensions are now in ems, so changing the text size in IE changes the whole page.
As the layout is nearly all in css it's been easy to implement 'text only' viewing, and a print version of pages which removes heading and left menu.
We've been doing a lot of work on the Short Course layouts, and short courses in particular show much better information now, including dates and costs. Viewings on the factsheets have gone through the roof, and there are a lot more enquiries coming through, with enquiries linked from the factsheets having the advantage of exact course codes. The Short Course team are working hard to keep all the factsheet information updated. We have yet to see if this translates into applications.
The main challenge now is to get us back up in Google, revising meta-descriptions and keywords, checking page content for relevance, and seeing if we can work out a way of putting dynamic descriptions into pages with dynamic content (like the factsheet pages)
Comments
Hi, how does a person contribute to the blog ? Or the gallery ? I've got photos of the Open Day, Compost Awarenes etc.
Hi Estelle,
You can do this by contacting Poppy in marketing.
Cheers
Stephen