by Matt McGee
One World Telecommunications
posted: March 1, 2005
For a long time, we at OWT were guilty of a common problem among
web design and development shops: Focusing on our clients so
much that our own web site fell into a state of disrepair. Our
web site was something we worked on only when we had time; it
was never a real priority.
In late 2003, we decided it was time to change that and put our
best foot forward. It was hard to get clients to take their web
sites seriously when we didn't take ours seriously. So we set
out to redesign OWTweb.com and the plan was to practice what we
preach:
simple, elegant design with a focus on great content to serve
our visitors and acquire more traffic through better search engine
visibility.
THE GOAL
Improve owtweb.com to position OWT as experts in the field web
development, design, and marketing. Increase search engine
visibility. Rebuild the web site with an emphasis on user friendliness
and
search engine friendliness.
THE PROBLEM
At the time, OWTweb.com offered plenty of information about
our services and pricing, but no information about our skills
and
expertise. There had been little attempt made to position
the site for search
engine visibility. There were elements of the site that were
not as user-friendly as they could be.
WHAT CHANGED
Usability Changes
This is what the OWTweb.com home page looked like prior to
the late 2003 redesign.
http://www.owtweb.com/resources/casestudy1.gif
The page, with all graphics and text, added up to 63k
total size. That's not too bad, but we believed the
speed could
be improved
for the benefit of our site visitors. With the new
home page, which can be seen at owtweb.com, we reduced the
amount of
graphics for
a faster-loading page.
Another user-friendly change was an increase in font
size. Text on the old home page was small and difficult
to read,
especially
under the WHY OWT? heading. Text on the new site is
larger and easier to read from top to bottom of the
page.
Search Engine Visibility Changes
We made a switch from graphical menu buttons (on the
left side of the old home page) to text-based menu
buttons (at
the top
of the current page). This is a slightly more SE-friendly
method, as it allows the site to benefit from the
anchor text of each
link.
We avoided any DHTML or javascript programming in
the site menu, because those can add a significant
amount
of code "junk" to
what a search engine crawler sees. Instead, the color change effect
on our text links are handled in the much more SE-friendly CSS
method.
We rewrote the content of the home page with an eye
toward making sure to mention some of the words and
phrases
people might use
to search for OWT appeared in the text. The copywriting
on the old site was more of a sales pitch.
Since there are thousands of web design shops, we
decided it wasn't realistic to expect our site to
rank in the
Top 10 for
generic
terms like "web design" or "web hosting." Instead,
we made sure to reference our location to attract local business
owners seeking a web design shop in this area. The home page references "Tri-Cities" a
couple times, and lists the names "Kennewick, Richland, Pasco," too.
Knowing that search engines like fresh content, we
added a "Newscenter" area
where links to related news articles and feature could be posted
on a daily basis. And we committed to writing regular articles
of original content for the search engine crawlers to add to their
databases. (And also to share our knowledge as an expert in this
field, which we'll discuss in a moment.)
Expert Positioning Changes
In our industry, as with most service industries,
knowledge and expertise are what separate one company
from the
next. Our knowledge
was nowhere to be found on the old OWTweb.com.
We decided that, in order to position ourselves as experts
in
this industry, we needed to give away some of our
knowledge in the form
of
how-to
and other informational articles about web development,
search engine visibility, and other aspects of
what we
do.
We added a "Resources" section where articles like that
were posted regularly at a rate of 1-2 per month. We also created
a weekly newsletter with Q&A from readers, and those are also
posted on the web site for all to read. All of this content, we
believe, helps position OWT as knowledgeable providers of web development
services.
RESULTS
The current OWTweb.com site is now a year old,
having launched in late February, 2004. There's
no empirical
way to measure
our success in positioning ourselves as an expert,
but we can see
concrete results in the other areas where we
aimed to improve.
Usability Results
Thanks to the reduction of graphics, the home
page now totals 21k, a 66% reduction in page
size. We
consider that, in and
of itself,
a success in terms of making the site more
user-friendly. It loads more quickly and allows visitors to
get straight to the
information
they want. The larger font size also makes
each
page easier to read, an important consideration
given
that we offer
so much
readable content (articles, newsletters, etc.).
Search Engine Visibility Results
As of this writing, OWTweb.com ranks in the
Top 10 on Google for the terms "kennewick web hosting", "kennewick web
design", "richland web hosting", and "richland
web design." We rank in the Top 15 of Yahoo for "kennewick
web hosting" and "kennewick web design". We rank
in the Top 20 of MSN Search for the terms "kennewick web hosting", "kennewick
web design", and "richland web hosting."
Thanks to the addition of our articles and
newsletters, we rank well on a variety of
unique terms that
bring targeted traffic
to our web site. For example, one of our
articles ranks 6th
in Google
for the phrase "getting listed on google." One of our
weekly newsletters ranks 4th in Google for "web smart colors."
But traffic is more important than rankings.
Traffic to the new OWTweb.com increased immediately,
peaking two months later in April, 2004,
before the typical spring/summer
slowdown.
It would only be fair to compare April,
2004, to April, 2003, to avoid those seasonal changes.
April 2004 daily page views: 53% higher
than April 2003
April 2004 daily visits: 91% higher
than April 2003
April 2004 monthly unique visitors:
180% higher than April 2003
In fact, increases in traffic are evident when
any two same months of 2003 and 2004
are
compared.
CONCLUSION
We believe that the OWTweb.com redesign
we launched one year ago has
been an unqualified success.
The results validate our system
of building of successful business
web sites:
start with
a simple, elegant design that's
both user friendly and search
engine friendly;
add quality content on a regular
basis; and position yourself
as an expert
or authority in your industry.
Back to Articles index |
