This document discusses iterative web redesign and micro redesigns. It advocates for taking small, deliberate steps to improve a website over time rather than waiting years between large-scale redesigns. Examples are provided of small changes made to a university website, such as changing the layout of story teasers, that led to major improvements in click-through rates. Tools for tracking website usage and testing changes are also presented. The document encourages attendees to start the redesign process by defining business objectives and tracking key metrics before making small, measurable changes.
Designing a website is an art that may require some serious and complete skills creativity levels. Many website owners go through immense stress when they realize that their website design is not up to the set standards and latest trends. If you want to avoid such situations then the following presentation is for you.
Press Ahead: How Modern Tribe Helped Take University Events VirtualWP Engine
What if you spent months planning a huge event, only for it to be impossible? In the highly competitive world of college recruiting, admit weekends have taken on an outsized role due to COVID-19, and universities have had to cancel or postpone annual, sought-after events. Learn how Reid Peifer, Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Modern Tribe helped an Ivy League university find their breakthrough moment to create a virtual admitted-students weekend and a commencement celebration using WP Engine and WordPress.
Designing a website is an art that may require some serious and complete skills creativity levels. Many website owners go through immense stress when they realize that their website design is not up to the set standards and latest trends. If you want to avoid such situations then the following presentation is for you.
Press Ahead: How Modern Tribe Helped Take University Events VirtualWP Engine
What if you spent months planning a huge event, only for it to be impossible? In the highly competitive world of college recruiting, admit weekends have taken on an outsized role due to COVID-19, and universities have had to cancel or postpone annual, sought-after events. Learn how Reid Peifer, Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Modern Tribe helped an Ivy League university find their breakthrough moment to create a virtual admitted-students weekend and a commencement celebration using WP Engine and WordPress.
Drupalcamp Scotland - Usability testing in an agile development processNeil Allison
A run through how I execute collaborative usability testing in an agile development process. Covering the operational detail, and tips to get stakeholders on board.
Delivered at Drupalcamp Scotland, 7 November 2015
Changing the World one WordPress Site at a TimeLesley Molecke
How we built a successful, distributed WordPress firm serving nonprofits
Video at http://wordpress.tv/2016/07/04/lesley-molecke-changing-world-one-wordpress-site-at-a-time-built-successful-distributed-firm-serving-nonprofits/
Presented at WordCamp Europe, Vienna Austria, June 2016
Showcasing Great Content: Don't Bury the Ledejvakoc
Harvard Law School (HLS) had a problem. They had amazing, high quality news content being created daily by the school that was not only getting lost quickly after it was published on the home page, but publishing it in the first place was a labor-intensive chore. Their old CMS didn’t publish in real-time, had no tagging functionality, and was neither mobile-friendly nor particularly accessible. And those were just a few of the problems.
This case study will address how a small department with limited resources moved to WordPress and become a proof of concept for redesigning and migrating the entire HLS site, helping to shape the whole school’s online strategy.
Christopher Rausch | Master Motivators | Presentation - Becoming Your Company...Christopher Rausch
Presented to the Fountain Valley Chamber of Commerce in 2010.
Focuses:
- Attitude
- Relationships
- Communication Skills
- Simple tips for improvements
The benefits of using ViewSpection's next generation inspection app that makes the policyholder your best inspector. Get a digital property in hours for a fraction of the cost of a traditional loss control inspection.
Complete website redesigns are a thing of the past, it's time to think beyond the launch it and leave it mentality. Learn how to discover the pain points of your website and successfully correct them. This interactive talk will walk you through your site as an end user. Learn about A/B and multivariate testing mechanisms, how to create effective tests, and how to publish results to build credibility and authority. This talk will leave you with the ability to take away a process to build upon.
Flexible Web Branding, the Case Against Single Web Templates - CASEV 2010Nick DeNardis
Look at the use of single templates on higher education websites. Implementing an institution-wide template sounds like a good idea at first but how does it perform in the real world? Get insights into the pros and cons of implementing a single template across all institution websites. We will explore what works and what doesn't, from both the management and end-user prospective. Discover techniques to embrace the uniqueness of each area of your institution and how to engage your visitors along the way.
http://nickdenardis.com/
Drupalcamp Scotland - Usability testing in an agile development processNeil Allison
A run through how I execute collaborative usability testing in an agile development process. Covering the operational detail, and tips to get stakeholders on board.
Delivered at Drupalcamp Scotland, 7 November 2015
Changing the World one WordPress Site at a TimeLesley Molecke
How we built a successful, distributed WordPress firm serving nonprofits
Video at http://wordpress.tv/2016/07/04/lesley-molecke-changing-world-one-wordpress-site-at-a-time-built-successful-distributed-firm-serving-nonprofits/
Presented at WordCamp Europe, Vienna Austria, June 2016
Showcasing Great Content: Don't Bury the Ledejvakoc
Harvard Law School (HLS) had a problem. They had amazing, high quality news content being created daily by the school that was not only getting lost quickly after it was published on the home page, but publishing it in the first place was a labor-intensive chore. Their old CMS didn’t publish in real-time, had no tagging functionality, and was neither mobile-friendly nor particularly accessible. And those were just a few of the problems.
This case study will address how a small department with limited resources moved to WordPress and become a proof of concept for redesigning and migrating the entire HLS site, helping to shape the whole school’s online strategy.
Christopher Rausch | Master Motivators | Presentation - Becoming Your Company...Christopher Rausch
Presented to the Fountain Valley Chamber of Commerce in 2010.
Focuses:
- Attitude
- Relationships
- Communication Skills
- Simple tips for improvements
The benefits of using ViewSpection's next generation inspection app that makes the policyholder your best inspector. Get a digital property in hours for a fraction of the cost of a traditional loss control inspection.
Complete website redesigns are a thing of the past, it's time to think beyond the launch it and leave it mentality. Learn how to discover the pain points of your website and successfully correct them. This interactive talk will walk you through your site as an end user. Learn about A/B and multivariate testing mechanisms, how to create effective tests, and how to publish results to build credibility and authority. This talk will leave you with the ability to take away a process to build upon.
Flexible Web Branding, the Case Against Single Web Templates - CASEV 2010Nick DeNardis
Look at the use of single templates on higher education websites. Implementing an institution-wide template sounds like a good idea at first but how does it perform in the real world? Get insights into the pros and cons of implementing a single template across all institution websites. We will explore what works and what doesn't, from both the management and end-user prospective. Discover techniques to embrace the uniqueness of each area of your institution and how to engage your visitors along the way.
http://nickdenardis.com/
Designing for next steps - A forward moving Web experienceNick DeNardis
Getting a visitor to your website is only half the battle: how do you keep them? A lot of attention is put on the "action" items on a homepage but it's more likely a visitor is landing on an interior page from a Web search or link. Every visual element, content or cue makes an impression with your visitor and influences what next step they take. The last thing you want to do is leave your visitor at a dead end or continuously force them to use the “back” button. With each page having a defined “next step” it gives your visitor a forward moving Web experience. The idea is more than just bigger and brighter action buttons. Your goal is the design an experience to make your visitors care. This session will walk through real life examples to identify common pitfalls and successful approaches, provide techniques to objectively look at your communications from your audience’s point of view and highlight tools to measure and track success of your communications.
Presentation about social media tools to help start-up businesses utilize the space with the least amount of time. The presentation was given at the Wayne State University to students learning to start businesses through the Blackstone LaunchPad.
Give Your Content Legs and Run With It - PSUWEB11Nick DeNardis
Nick DeNardis & Mallory Wood
Congratulations, you have a website and it is full of content. But... what are you (the human!) doing on the back-end to make sure that visitors are finding the info they came for? Happy Visitors = Happy You. Reacting to your visitors needs, or even better, being proactive will go a long way in enhancing a visitor’s experience with your website. This session will teach you to do just that, helping you think beyond “write it and leave it” by showing you how to transform what’s generally static into long lasting social and interactive content. Let’s redefine what it means to publish content, rethink where it gets published, and rework existing content to meet your visitor’s needs.
http://psuweb11.sched.org/event/5c3d1b9d1c9140abe6d64d06d4e2dc7c
Presentation made by Nick DeNardis at the Case V conference on December 15, 2009 in Chicago, IL. It details the Web site redesign process of Wayne State University and how we successfully launched 350 redesigned sites in 5 years.
http://wcs.wayne.edu/casev/
Rethinking UX Research - Design4Drupal 2014 keynote presentationPerfetti Media
How do you really know what your users want? How do you ensure your designs work for your prospects and customers? How can you be confident that your design changes improve your site?
There are those that believe that user research must be a complex and scientific process that takes a lot of time, money, and resources. However, in the real world, most designers and developers don't have the luxury to spend weeks and months on their user research.
It's possible to get useful results without the time-consuming expense of traditional user research methods. In this presentation, Christine Perfetti will share proven strategies and techniques for successfully integrating UX research into your process. You'll learn how to answer essential design questions using methods that take only a day—and sometimes only 10 minutes!
Presented by Andy Boyer, Co-Founder of Relaborate; John Jerome, President, Jerome & Associates and David Weidner, Founder, CEO, Clever Rain Technologies, Inc.
our goal is simple: bring order to higher ed’s wild, wild Web. We understand the challenges facing higher education and the growing demands placed on Web teams. We’ve been there. We've experienced the silos, the shrinking resources, the lack of defined processes and the growing complexity.
These slides will demonstrate web governance best practices to bring order and increased efficiency. Matt will help you find a path from battles to buy in, as well as help you get around a few common roadblock.
Key Takeaways:
-Justify additional resources
-Prioritize based on strategic goals
-Truly collaborative web strategy planning
-Select and optimize the campus web tools set
-Show risk associated with not investing in Web
View The Science of Website Redesign, in which we will cover everything you need to know before you embark on the path of redesigning your site: http://bit.ly/9cv7sm
The Power of SEO: WeddingWire World - John LincolnJohn Lincoln
In this presentation, John Lincoln covers the power of search engine optimization. This is a beginner SEO course that looks at how people are searching on the internet today.
https://ignitevisibility.com
Improving the Success of Your Website presentation delivered by Shane Fell of Top Floor Technologies at the 2013 Mid Am Horticultural Trade Show at Navy Pier in Chicago.
Driving Online Sales - Craig Sullivan, The future of the online marketplace 2...Invest Northern Ireland
Craig Sullivan,Group Customer Experience Manager, Belron
Craig is Group Customer Experience Manager at Belron (Autoglass) looking after 35 international websites using optimisation, web analytics and customer insight techniques to drive engagement and conversion. Craig has over 14 years of experience in the Industry and in the past has worked on projects for high street names such as LOVEFiLM,International, John Lewis Partnership and Waitrose.
The big RESET button for enterprise websitesDaniel Fowler
In 2013, the University of Georgia's College of Education hired their first-ever web team manager. I was that manager. Inheriting a 6,000+ page conglomeration of ~120 WordPress websites, there was a lot of work ahead of me. I was told I had a blank slate before me, and that I needed to launch a new website in 7 months with 1 team member and no resources. This is a summary of that project and the key lessons I learned while confronting numerous challenges including a new CMS, an overhauled information architecture, a fresh design, and maybe the hardest of all - the culture shock.
Not Just a Pretty Face: Combining Form and Function for Maximum ConversionsWP Engine
The design, UX and ecommerce experts at agency Digital River, who will walk you through steps you can take to optimize the flow within your website and maximize conversions, showing examples and common mistakes made.
To view the on-demand webinar, register now at: https://hs.wpengine.com/webinar-form-function-maximum-conversions
Inbound School Marketing: Is Your Website Helping The Bottom Line?Kyle James
The rules of the game have changed. Having a website is standard practice but your website is more than a branding piece for your institution. The majority of almost every school’s annual budget comes from tuition so helping increase enrollment has to be the site's top priority. Are you fully leveraging it for a marketing purpose? How is your social media, blogging, mobile efforts and search engine optimization coming together to help you meet these goals? In this presentation, you'll get a blue print for success. We will discuss the importance of your website in the marketing and recruitment funnel, how you can actually get a ROI on marketing and give you formulas and calculators to financially justify future projects.
http://2012.highedweb.org/EventDetail.aspx?guid=7ef9df82-b884-43ae-b5bd-b11066cb0ad4
How to get a grip of your website (and then keep hold)Neil Allison
Presentation given at a meeting of the Web Publishing Community at The University of Edinburgh, 2 December 2015.
Covers key elements of website strategy, user research and website development in 4 steps.
A transcript is available at:
http://website-programme-blog.is.ed.ac.uk/how-to-get-a-grip-of-your-website-and-then-keep-hold/
Stop Wasting Your Analytics Budget - edUi 2016Mitch Daniels
When approached with clear intentions, web analytics can be a game-changing part of any online presence. It can inform massive redesigns, drive additional engagement, and spur continued site improvements.
Despite its potential, the full power of analytics is often neutered by a misappropriation of priorities and resources, leading to a stream of sterile, uninspiring reports and dashboards. Learn to recognize these challenges, identify them within your own organization, and confront them head on.
We’ll explore the distinction between ‘interesting’ and ‘actionable’ data, the downsides of monthly reports, and the importance of the 10/90 rule. Finally, we’ll identify a single word that will immediately push your analytics strategy in the right direction: “Why?”.
“If they would just listen to us...”: Turning Internal Client Relationships i...Michael Powers
You’re smart. (You do work in higher ed, after all.) You know your stuff. You have ideas. New ideas. Good ideas. And yet—your clients (internal or external) don’t want your ideas. Or your style guide. They know what they want: the same thing they’ve been doing for the last ten years. Why won’t they just listen to you?
The answer is finding ways to turn to client relationships into real collaborations. When we move from a conformance mindset to a collaboration mindset, we can find ourselves in the position to do our best work—work our clients will love.
What you’ll learn:
• How to move from a conformance to a collaboration mindset.
• Using workshop techniques (like job stories, pair writing, mad libs, and more) in meeting settings.
• How to uncover the real problems your clients are facing, and solve them—together.
Similar to Iterative Website Redesign - Micro Goals in Action (20)
How to be better at getting things done in 2022Nick DeNardis
Focuses on changing habits, making time for focused attention, using tools to take back control of your time and using tools to keep track of ideas and decisions asynchronously.
Five-minute talk as part of the How To Be Better In 2022 event.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-be-better-in-2022-tickets-235361250837
What is quality code? From cruft to craftNick DeNardis
No one sets out to create crufty code, but too often the pressure to "push it out the door and we'll fix it later" gets the best of us all. Before you know it, it's three projects later, the sun is still shining and you're still getting a paycheck. So where is the incentive to go back and clean under the rug?
Poor core quality isn't just a developer problem, either. It bleeds into team moral, deters decision agility, and ultimately prevents team members from getting into flow.
Quality code isn't something that requires a complete rewrite either (which is likely impossible), but can be accomplished with style guides, code reviews and a devotion to team investment time.
The pressure to ship will always be there, but starting (or maintaining) projects with an agreed upon foundation alleviates developers and designers from making potentially hundreds of decisions each day. This leaves room for the decisions that actually matter.
Learn how to transform your team, regardless of your position, into a lean, mean standards machine. Develop a multi-tier style guide, workflow and practices that focus on knowledge and consensus building. Eliminate the mundane decisions and allow the team to focus on its craft.
Why #littlebigdetails Matter and What You Should Do About ThemNick DeNardis
The audience, structure and often the design of university websites are 90% the same (for the most part). Although your website is probably not the sole reason students enroll, it can be a detractor. The difference between a regular site and a rememberable one is the #littlebigdetails. A lot of time is spent on the “big details” of a website, like the centerpiece image, and things that everyone expects, frankly the easy decisions. The harder, but more memorable, are the little details that make a big difference in your user's experience. Learn why these details make such a large impact and how to take a step back to discover how to add a little joy to your user experience.
Designing for next steps: A forward moving Web experienceNick DeNardis
Getting a visitor to your website is only half the battle. How do you keep them? A lot of attention is put on the "action" items on a homepage, but it's more likely a visitor is landing on an interior page from a Web search or link. Every visual element, content or cue makes an impression with your visitor and influences what next step they take. The last thing you want to do is leave your visitor at a dead end or continuously force them to use the back button. With each page having a defined next step it gives your visitor a forward moving Web experience.
The idea is more than just bigger and brighter action buttons. No matter how large you make them your visitors are not going to click if they don't care. Your goal is the design an experience to make your visitors care.
Producing a mobile presence. Timeline: Yesterday...Nick DeNardis
Having a comprehensive mobile strategy is great but your users aren’t waiting around till you have have a pixel perfect solution. Your users are on their mobile devices right now waiting to access your content, having something up is better than nothing. This talk is a look at creating a practical, agile and ever evolving mobile Web presence. A mobile presence can be created on a small budget and without a lot of time. An introduction to the tools, frameworks and testing strategies needed to get a mobile website up quickly and moving in a more useful and usable direction each day.
Creating a separate mobile website is a great idea until someone changes a data source on you. Your users don’t care if your LDAP is down or why they can’t pull up next the class schedule for next semester. In this session you will learn how to plan for the worst; network outages, slow response times and unorganized data. The mobile Web isn’t very useful without content and often that content is gathered from many sources that are out of the developers control. Gathering, protecting and organizing that data is the job of a smart developer and a successful mobile Web presence. This is accomplished by adding an API layer to everything you do. This session will walk you through the ins and outs of creating and maintaining a Web API that can extend far beyond your mobile presence.
Your visitors interact with content, not with your website. Content consistency is crucial to a successful user experience. Re-publishing is one option but it’s an inside-out action that relies on the authority controlling where the information goes. An API frees your data and the responsibility to where it is published and accessed. Mobile is a major consumer for your API but not every API is setup to handle the mass of requests coming from those devices. Learn how to mobile devices consume API’s with limited or low bandwidth and how to to tailor your API to be as efficient and effective as possible.
http://environmentsforhumans.com/2012/doteduguru-summit/
Golden Rule for the Web - #eduGuruSummitNick DeNardis
Why you cannot outsource a sustainable redesign project, but jump starting it has to come from the outside. We all know what annoys us online, why do we keep doing it to our users?
Working internally you come across various motivations and keeping the users front and center can be difficult. Learn strategies and techniques to keep the end user top of mind and driving decisions.
Better Design Through Analytics - #eduiconf 2010Nick DeNardis
It’s been said that “good designers redesign, great designers realign“. Design is a continual process of refinement, realignment and improvement. But how do you decide what needs refining? Do you make informed decisions or are you grasping at straws in the dark?
Web site statistics hold the key to making informed decisions, but throwing a little Google Analytics code on your site isn’t really enough.
In this half-day workshop you will learn how to use web statistics to better refine your designs. Get the basics of what all those analytics numbers mean, learn how to set measurable goals, and define conversions. Then take it to the next level with the Google Website Optimizer, A/B and multivariate testing.
Web Metrics: An Overview - #eduiconf 2010Nick DeNardis
Web site statistics hold the key to making informed decisions, but throwing a little Google Analytics code on your site isn’t really enough.
In this one hour session you will learn how to use web statistics to better refine your designs. Get the basics of what all those analytics numbers mean, learn how to set measurable goals, and define conversions.
Conference Wrap Up: http://doteduguru.com/id6217-edui-2010-conference-wrap-up.html
Analyzing Real-time User Visitor SearchesNick DeNardis
Higher education websites always have a steady supply of visitors. It's great to see the numbers in Google Analyics fluctuate each day and trend upwards over time, but are your visitors finding what they came for? This talk is a high-level-to-in-depth look at tracking what visitors are searching for in real time from your site. We'll go beyond the consolidated "popular keywords" list to an actual trend list with grouped phases and pages. The goal is peer into the visitor's mind and figure out why they are searching for "address" on the Contact Us page or "Professor Smith" on the Faculty Information page. Higher education websites always struggle to accommodate two audiences, internal and external. Search results based on location don't lie, it's easy to combine real internal searches with reasons why quicklinks and extra menus may or may not be functioning as optimally as they should. It's time to go beyond pageviews and user paths and look at real-time search analytics.
Break Through the Administrative Barriers and Focus on Your Users.
http://miupa.org/fresh/break-through-the-administrative-barriers-and-focus-on-your-users/
A presentation about web standards and accessibility I gave to the ASIS&T group at Wayne State University.
Full Explanation:
http://wsuasist.blogspot.com/2009/03/web-standards-and-accessibility.html
Internal presentation given by Nick DeNardis at Wayne State University to the Marketing and Communications creative group for internal employee development.
2. Who am I?
Associate Director of Web Communications
Wayne State University
http://wayne.edu/
Host of EDU Checkup
http://educheckup.com/
Writer for .eduGuru
http://doteduguru.com/
Curator of EDU Snippits
http://edusnippits.com/
19. A measly 0.009 %
of ~820,000 visitors per month
= less than 100 click-throughs
20. • Drop the drawer down then up
• Remove categories
• Remove branding images
21.
22. • Pros
–Story displayed without the visitor clicking
–Auto rotate if visitor is on page too long
• Cons
–Takes up additional height
–Weird spacing in the menu
–Hard to find images that wide
23.
24. • Pros
–Stories are front and center
–Only some additional height needed
–Easier to find images to fit
–Auto rotate if visitor is on page too long
• Cons
–Less space for story headlines
25. New CTR: 0.8 %
Now ~6,500 click-throughs per month
6400 % improvement
40. To generate requests for more information
To encourage people to visit campus
To reflect positively on XYZ university and
increase it’s reputation
The increase the profile of XYZ and it’s faculty,
students and alumni
46. Privacy
• Privacy policy is a must
• Tracking via GA must be in it
• Tracking via cookies can be disabled
• Don’t know what third parties are doing
47. Tools of the trade
• Google Analytics
http://google.com/analytics
• Google Website Optimizer
http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer
• Crazy Egg
http://crazyegg.com
• Click Tale
http://clicktale.com
• Woopra
http://woopra.com
• Websort
http://websort.net/
87. • Identify a small problem
• Figure out a way to track it
• Propose changes
• Talk about it with some end users
• Implement the most appropriate one
• Review the results
• Document and share