Sazbean

You may be wondering if all these tips for redesigning your website to be customer-centric work.

A month ago we redesigned the flagship website (a B2B publication) at the publishing company where I work. The redesign focused on increasing the amount of content that is updated more frequently, offering more content (including blogs and video), and making it easier for readers to find what they’re looking for (by following good usability practices).

Since the redesign we’ve been monitoring their traffic using Google Analytics because it filters out all search engines and crawlers. The average weekly visits have increased 34%, average weekly page views have increased 23% and average weekly visitors have increased 36%. The change was so dramatic that the traffic on the first day was higher than it had been in six months (probably due to word-of-mouth or a forum post somewhere) – the publication didn’t advertise the redesign in print until the following Monday which had another increase in traffic.

Website optimization is a constant process so there still is work to do to see what works for our customers (readers) and what doesn’t. Using Google’s stats and site overlay we’re able to constantly tweak the site to help readers find what they’re looking for. Next step is to take a look at few more customer-problem sections as shown by a high percentage of exits on certain pages (through Google analytics) and to consider removing registration requirements from the rest of the content. We’ll also take a look at the keyword cloud on the site (what keywords are repeated throughout the content) and how they relate what readers are looking for through search engines (including our own).

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, usability, design, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting