LoveWorldSAT Website
Project Overview
It was a new job, and I was hired to manage a TV station’s website, When I checked on the website, I realized it needed a complete overhaul. Even without discussing with my superiors, I already started noticing the pain-points immediately I opened the website. Information architecture, look and feel, content strategy, SEO, and social connections all cried out for attention. I immediately realized it was a great project to take on, and I was ready for it.
Explore + Define
The great thing about the project was that the staff of the company were major users of the site, as well as
The research phase involved pain-points from users, and loads of information from site statistics. The statistics showed us what keywords people searched for to find our site, what pages were visited, what pages drew the most traffic, and where people spent the most time. This allowed us to determine the basic user needs of the site, and we realized people needed constant regular updates, and left immediately they found the same info or stayed a bit longer when something new was posted.
Initial Website
Ideate + Design + Test
The determination was to create a “bloglike” home page, rich with information, multimedia, and graphics, to keep the traffic that never goes past the home page engaged as long as possible. Thus we had a live TV player on the home page, videos on demand, scrollable galleries and pop-up (lightbox) articles.
Interestingly, although I carried out low-fidelity and medium-fidelity prototypes, a high-fidelity prototype was required by management for review, so I had to do three high-fi prototypes. Apparently, the
We also researched other related websites, what information the most visited ones had, as well as how those types of content were viral on Social Media. This helped to determine the content strategy to follow.
As a TV station, “content” is conceived and incubated by the Content Unit and producers, and the production crew carries out the implementation. I suggested that the producers created a summary of their outlines to post on the site, as well as the production crew delivering content to IT immediately after airing. We also had to create capacity within the IT Unit to edit and post content. We went from 280k hits per month to 3 million hits per month.
Another game-changer was the prominent date stamps on the posts that showed users that we had fresh content regularly.
We also used a live chat software on the site to engage with site visitors in real time, and interestingly, we could see how long they spent on what pages, and what pages they were on when we engaged them. We also drew great feedback from them in our interactions, that helped in iteration phases.
Social media became an integral part of the website with traffic running through and through both platforms.
Results
The time spent on the home page after the project was unprecedented, with people spending as long as three hours on the home page alone, watching videos-on-demand, reading recent tweets, reading program excerpts, viewing images, watching Live TV, and reading the pop-up news stories.
Also, traffic on the site boomed due to the revamped Content Strategy. A keyword/phrase we discovered was people online searching for information on “Public Channels” on the cable service we use. We put that information unto the site, so people could configure their decoders easily. As I expected, people searching for that info, even for other TV stations came unto our site, and it became top-two search traffic sources for the site. This was especially beneficial because people were also targetting other Christian TV stations which were on public channels (competitors).
Challenges
With management not realizing the admin that goes into UX design, my commission was “Create a New Website”. Help was got by cooperative fellow staff and users. I was also the developer, and because I had experience in Content Management and Digital Marketing, I also handled those responsibilities.
Conclusions
Before I left the organization to study, carried out a major review of the website as shown below: (available at www.loveworldsat.org) at the time of this posting. Even though I find the former one more visually appealing, the latter was in response to usage of the site and presented a new and fresh experience. A major change was also in the SEO. A great takeaway was that I learned Card-Sorting, and used it for the first time on this project.
Also, I was made the Head of IT on this project… (I’m trying not to say “as a result of…).
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