Today marks one year from the launch of Online Behavior. As I looked into the past and analyzed what I learned and the metamorphosis that the site went through, I thought it would be interesting to share it.
We have worked to integrate Feedburner, Doubleclick, Webmaster Tools, Mailchimp and Youtube numbers into Google Analytics and we worked with platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to promote the site. We had thought leaders posting articles, we had top notch presentations from the eMetrics Summit, and we partnered with a group from Stanford to research advertising using the website.
Below I describe some of the things we did during the last year of activity in more details.
Website Design and User Experience
The whole development and design of the website took around 6 months of work. While looking at the different sketches for the homepage that were designed, I couldn’t hide my smile when I looked at the very first draft:
This version was a bit to green! And the social icons, which are an important conversion of the website, were too hidden. But the navigation was already defined back then.
After around 7 different versions we went live, on June 8th 2010, with the version that follows. This version was already a huge improvement, with the new social icons, the new color palette, the new logo, and an improved featured section.
We have tweaked and tested this version for a few months, until we decided to change some of the main elements such as the featured box, the header design and other elements. As mentioned above, the social icons are very important to the website and our newsletter is a main conversion too. Here is the current version (as of June 8th, 2011):
In addition to the homepage, we have worked hard to design creative and innovative pages such as the 404 page, the maintenance page, the contact page, the about page and others.
Website Platform
As we started our journey, we believed that WordPress was the right platform for us, but as time went by we found out that we might be able to do all that we wanted with WP, but it would require lots of development. So we decided to migrate from WordPress to Drupal.
In terms of platforms, we have invested in our Facebook page and also created recently a branded channel on Youtube.
Website Content
Content was always our main focus, we strive to bring the most interesting content so that our readers enjoy surfing the website. With that in mind, we partnered with the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit to create the eMetrics Summit video channel on our site. This means we film the conference twice a year and post weekly presentations and interviews on the website.
Stay Tuned!
The website is currently under aggressive development, and we expect to launch a whole new section with a whole new type of content. In addition, we are still working to improve the user experience and bring more thought leaders to write and be interviewed by us.
Looking forward to your comments!
