Perils, Pitfalls, and Pleasures: Moving Print Publications to Life Online
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This document summarizes a presentation by Bob Johnson and Jay Collier on moving print publications to online formats. It outlines some of the key challenges ("perils" and "pitfalls") of directly translating print designs to the web, where readers have little time to engage. Specifically, it notes that online readers scan pages quickly looking to connect within 5 seconds. The document then highlights some strategies various colleges and universities have used successfully to reformat their print publications for the web in a way that allows for quick scanning, such as using blog software or a "blogazine" format. It concludes by outlining Bates College's process for redesigning their website and digital publications.
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Perils, Pitfalls, and Pleasures: Moving Print Publications to Life Online
- 8. You can’t scan this annual report… Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC
- 9. You can’t scan magazines like this… Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC
- 10. “ Flip” technology doesn’t help… http://issuu.com/umson/docs/university_of_maryland_nursing Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC
- 12. Chicago gets it right for years… http://magazine.uchicago.edu/ Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC
- 13. Carleton prompts action… http://magazine.carleton.ca/ Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC
- 14. Easy to scan annual giving report… https://apps.carleton.edu/giving/report/2009/ Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC
- 15. Give people a format choice? http://magazine.jhu.edu/ Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC
- 16. “ Blogazine” format works well… http://alfredmagazine.alfred.edu/... http://csumagazine.com/ Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC
- 17. Case Study: Bates Co llege
- 19. Define vision and goals
- 20. Be dependable – anywhere, any time, any device Be intuitive – simple publishing, searching, finding Be helpful – helpful information and instructions Be interesting – appealing, personal, immersive Be personalizable – up to date feeds by interest Be welcoming – online spaces for collaboration Be meaningful – insight into what matters to you
- 31. Evaluate costs and benefits
- 39. bit.ly/wphighed
Editor's Notes
- This afternoon, I'm going to share the process we used, from the original blueprint and development, to what worked and what we learned. And, finally, I'll talk about the benefits we've seen and where we're going next.
- We started out by holding over a dozen listening sessions to find out what students, parents, alumni, faculty, and staff wanted from their online relationships with our College. The comments were consistent: everyone wanted the same kinds of things -- regardless of the content or system -- from Magazine features to Reunion information to event registration:
- First, they said effective online experiences should be dependable – working anywhere, any time, from any device, on any network Second, they should be usable – with intuitive publishing, searching, finding that does not require a manual or a help desk.Third, They should be helpful – with information and instructions that answer your questions quickly Fourth They should be interesting – appealing, immersive, lively, in a style that is engaging to each audience. Fifth, They should be personalizable – with subscription and notifications on topics of personal interests Sixth, they should be welcoming spaces where multiple perspectives are presented and encouraged Finally, they should be meaningful and inspiring – providing insight into what matters to you. They need to be worth your time.
- We also wanted to help people explore all of our content, and discover what was of interest to them, organically, without having to start all over in each Web site in our domain. We wanted to create a platform where people could answer their questions, follow their curiosity, and make t
- We realized it was important to see the pathways that brought people to our online content, as well as where they would go afterwards, so we developed a whole-domain blueprint for all of our content and systems. This would help us identify the context for each piece. telling our stories
- We decided to start with first impressions: the home page, top-level themes, and the collection of features and stories that illustrated them. The Home site would contain the primary themes and phases of the Bates life span -- from initial awareness to application to academics to activities to alumni life The Views site would contain ALL of our official print content -- text and images from our news releases, features, and Magazine -- plus all multimedia -- tied together into a seamless pathways by a set of common categories. We had several goals. We wanted to improve results in search engines. We wanted to improve placement in alerts, blogs, social media. We wanted to place content where it could be found naturally in our site
- So, to show our editors and authors how we could enhance the findability and syndication of their content, we created a demo site called Bates Views out at Wordpress.com hosting and posted several hundred recent stories. (Over the previous two years, my students and I had installed and built demo sites in WordPress, Drupal, and Expression Engine, and WordPress had become our software of choice.)
- The demo allowed us to show our authors the WordPress editing interface and develop and develop the categories that would help surface those stories when they were optimized for search engines and social media discovery. [WP INTERFACE WITH CATEGORIES]
- We integrated the demo architecture, stories, and categories into a prototype using installed Wordpress software on an external hosting service. Ethan Magoon, our stellar interface designer built themes for the site and our editors copyedited the text. Our photographer selected galleries from her digital collection to illustrate each point. [WP PROTOTYPE (Screen shot of academics with stories, campus life with stories)]
- Now that we had the wide selection of themes and a deep pool of editorial, I created landing pages for our publications to re-aggregrate their content.
- Email subscriptions were a real bonus. For the campaign workflow, I set up opt-in e-mail campaigns through MailChimp to deliver content as soon as our editorial staff post content into our Views news blog, So, each segment is driven by categories delivered by RSS; no need to create a separate e-mail message for each campaign.
- After the transition settled down, we now had a place for our editors and authors to embed their multimedia pieces, so they stepped up the production queue.
- The WordPress user interface is easier to use than our legacy content management system.
- Categorizing stories for syndication and search takes time to master. The traditional publishing process is to produce a magazine, handbook, or brochure and then archive it. Categories allow published content to surface and be reused across the enterprise over time, keeping prior content alive.
- Due to the fact that we were now posting stories into a blog RSS feed, stories are picked up and distributed by Google Alerts much more quickly, often within an hour or two (rather than weeks if ever). Visitors are looking around our site and exploring pathways of interest to them. Our bounce rate -- people who arrive at the site and only view one page -- went down from 60% to 13% [Analytics screen]
- Our number of daily unique visitors went from 0 to 30,000 in one day. Our bounce rate — visitors who arrive at a page or post and leave immediately — went down from 58% to 11% over the past year. This is a very good as a preliminary measurement of engagement.
- We began offering e-mail updates, first a daily digest, and then weekly updates by theme: academics, research, athletics, alumni. We went from 0 subscribers to 1800 in less than (august to april) 8 months, with a total of 12,400 emails being sent each month. Our open rate (38%) is much higher than the industry average as reported by MailChimp, our campaign service provider.
- We acquired more than 1800 subscribers in less than 3 months, with a total of 12,400 separate emails being sent -- by request -- in March alone. More than 2/3 of subscribers select our major monthly distribution, and the open and click rates are much higher than the industry average, at least as reported through MailChimp, our service provider.
- Moving from print to the Web may save paper, but it does not necessarily save staff time. Our editorial staff is using gained time to produce multimedia content.
- I want to encourage you to add your school, if you haven’t already, to our growing WordPress in Higher Education list at Google Docs. The short URL is bitly - slash - wphighed