Site redesign...

New architecture for www.internet time
I'm in the midst of overhauling www.internettime.com. The site is morphing from a quasi-encyclopedia of eLearning into a newspaper of performance improvement. "Newspaper" isn't quite the right word. The restructured site will place more emphasis on what's going on at the moment, generally via blogs and new links. Unlike a newspaper, the site will also provide opportunities for discussion and interchange, offering the ability to comment on the blogs and take part in threaded discussions.

Private vs. public discussion
This website is about learning. Mine and yours. All too often, we only get to see the result of a web project, not the design process that got it there. If you're not interested in this level of detail, click something in the right column to skip over it.

How much outbound?
I'm still pondering how much outbound content to send. On the one hand, I don't want to add to the world's oversupply of Spam or to appear intrusive. On the other, of the 77 people who have responded to my ongoing survey thus far, 43% visit "several times a year" and 22% drop by once a month. I take this to mean that the majority of visitors read stale news.

I suppose I could distribute a newsletter. That entails beefing up the invitation to join the mail list. Perhaps a prize with each issue. An irregular distribution schedule would increase value. Maybe limit the newsletter to the cognoscenti.

Webtrends Stats for September 1-6
The number of visitors here continues to increase.

• 4,000 people visited the site in these first six days, 1,000 of them more than one time.
• 4 out of 5 visitors use Internet Explorer, 7% use Netscape, and the remainder are robots, crawlers, site-checkers, blog-bots, and unidentifiables.
• For the first time, more people are visiting the blogs than the eLearning Jump Page.
• It's an embarrassment but I still haven't been able to track down why my most popular page is 404. Maybe I should just redirect 404s to my blog. Nah. What I'll do is put a link-checker to work on the site to spot the bad URLs.

  Most Popular Downloads
  

• 500 people have downloaded the DNA of eLearning White Paper this week.(but it's offered quite prominently and is new).
  
• The analyst reports from Merrill Lynch, U.S. Bancorp, Goldman, Morgan Keegan, Hambrecht, and Piper Jaffray remain extremely popular -- 20 to 100 downloads a day -- in spite of the fact that they're all out of date. These tomes were written in the heyday of dot-com euphoria. Popular or not, they're misleading and will go to the archives: accessible but not obviously so.
• 5 to 10 people a day download each of my dozen most popular articles and papers.

Observations from the first 77 respondents to my Customer Survey
Things that disappoint:

• Don't know when there's something new unless I remember to visit...
• Too much blah, blah, blah
  
• Hard to find where i was - navigation could be improved
  
• Seems to change a lot, but in a way that makes me shaky and uncertain where I am
  
• It's really ugly. (Jay: So's your momma.)
  
• Much of the market research, white papers are not current (<2001)
  
• navigation not clear - feel overwhelmed
  
• the organization. The site doesn't immediately let me align my goals with the layout. I think it could use a bit Needs more clear hooks. For instance, what is it that Internet Time group does? I can't tell from the front page of the site. That strikes me as a design flaw.

My takeaways are to

• tighten up the organization and make the skeleton more clear.
  
• add a "contact me when new stuff appears" button
  
• improve "where am I?" with breadcrumb navigation aid

• make it clear what Internet Time Group does

Summary for 9/1-6/2002

Average Number of Visitors per day on Weekdays 1,078

Average Number of Hits per day on Weekdays 14,843

Average Number of Visitors for the entire Weekend 619

Average Number of Hits for the entire Weekend 6,122

Most Active Day of the Week Wed

Least Active Day of the Week Sat

Most Active Day Ever September 04, 2002

Number of Hits on Most Active Day 16,824

Least Active Day Ever September 07, 2002

Number of Hits on Least Active Day 28

Most Active Hour of the Day 12:00-12:59

Least Active Hour of the Day 02:00-02:59

Search Engines
Google rules.

Referrals %

1. Google 1,558 79.2%

2. Yahoo 227 11.54%

3. Microsoft Network 106 5.38%

4. AltaVista 53 2.69%

Browsers
Of the Microsoft Internet Explorer front, just about everyone uses 4.0 or higher.

Browser Visits %

1. Explorer 5.x 2,299 54.54%

2. Explorer 6.x 1,810 42.94%

3. Explorer 4.x 102 2.41%


The same holds ture for Netscapers:

1. Netscape 4.x 206 58.35%

2. Netscape 5.x 136 38.52%

Windows is far and away the platform of choice. Linux users are < 1%, Mac < 4%.

1. Windows 2000 2,044 38.47%

2. Windows 98 1,675 31.52%

3. Others 720 13.55%

4. Windows NT 407 7.66%

5. Macintosh PowerPC 211 3.97%

6. Windows 95 185 3.48%

Posted by Jay Cross at September 7, 2002 10:03 AM | TrackBack