Archive for March, 2007
March 30, 2007
New Web Site Design for High Context Consulting
I launched a new design for my web site earlier this week. I wanted to freshen up the look and make some structural changes to the content and design. The cobbler finally has some new shoes of his own. :)
The design is fully standards compliant, thus practicing what I preach to my clients. The entire site is managed with WordPress, making use of it’s ability to publish standard pages as well as blog posts.
Many thanks to Steve Smith of Ordered List for his work on creating and deploying the design.
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March 28, 2007
Ben and Richard on Prometheus
Ben Martin has posted an interesting interview with Richard Lewis about the rebirth of the Prometheus retreat as a stand-alone, volunteer run effort. (Here is an earlier post I made about this issue.)
Nice illustration of how people can pursue the same mission as an association without actually doing so through the association. I think ASAE handled this in a productive fashion, so kudos to them! There are important strategic lessons in this chain of events for all membership organizations.
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March 15, 2007
Page views are up 10%! So what?
Metrics matter. People often say, “You get what you measure.” Metrics for metrics sake rarely actually contribute to the bottom line, however. When determining your web site metrics, it is better to focus on two or three that actually indicate value being created for the company than on a hundred that mean nothing.
Working really hard to improve the number of pages viewed on your site without understanding how each additional view creates value is asking for trouble. You may be increasing page views by such bogus methods as an automatic page refresh (as the Washington Post does with their home page) or by creating multiple clicks to complete a simple action, all of which frustrates your users. But your metrics look great!
Measure the creation and delivery of value. Ignore everything else.
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March 15, 2007
Why Natural Search Engine Placement Is Risky as a Primary Strategy
This Wall Street Journal article, How Search-Engine Rules Cause Sites to Go Missing, provides several examples of why relying on search engine driven traffic to your site as a primary strategy brings along some risks. Your business is subject to significant impact from relatively minor adjustments to the search engine algorithms and policies.
That said, the main example in the article is of a news web site that wants to change its domain name from a .net to a .com for branding reasons (after paying $1 million for the .com address):
Such a simple change, Mr. Skrenta has discovered, could have disastrous short-term results. About 50% of visits to his news site come through a search engine — and about 90% of the time, that is Google. Some companies say their sites have disappeared from top search results for weeks or months after making address switches, due to quirky rules Google and other search engines have adopted. So the same user who typed “Anna Nicole Smith news” into Google last week and saw Topix.net as a top result might not see it at all after the change to Topix.com.
Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10%, that would essentially be a 10% loss in ad revenue, Mr. Skrenta says. “Because of this little mechanical issue, it could be a catastrophe for us,” he says.
Since Google ascribes credibility to results on domains that it trusts, changing your domain name can have significant impact, as topix is discovering.
Any business model should be flexible enough to not be overly dependent on one source of business. For most organizations, search engine placement should be an important but not overarching strategy for the company.
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March 13, 2007
Getting Out of the Way
Bill Flagg, the blogging president of RegOnline, recently posted this report about improvements to their online registration process:
Last April we cut 2/3 of the fields from our RegOnline open account form and then saw our sign-up rate triple. The way we did that was by asking for all the billing information later in the process when they are ready to start taking real registrations. We expect to see our conversions from free to paid to go down some, but happy to say our net # of paid users is increasing dramatically.
Hope this helps.
Indeed it does! One of the entries in our book, We Have Always Done It That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change, that I wrote was about just this. Get out of the way of your members/customers when they are ready to invest with you. Here is the full entry from the book, also available on the WHADITW blog:
Many associations collect demographic data from their members when they join or renew their membership. Sometimes this can be as simple as a few check boxes to more involved multi-page surveys. When dues invoices could only be sent via postal mail, it made sense to piggy back a data collection tool with it to save money on postage and take advantage of the member’s attention.
However, just because it works well in snail mail doesn’t mean you should do it online. For example, the cost-saving benefit goes away when you invoice for dues via e-mail or accept a new member via your web site. Another challenge is that conducting an online survey of a member before they can renew is much more invasive of an interruption than including a paper form in the mail. Making online payment challenging by requiring extraneous forms to be completed reduces the benefits of paying online to your members, which will raise your costs when they choose to go with traditional methods such as calling you or mailing in forms that need to be processed.
When a member has made the decision to invest more money in the association by purchasing a product or paying dues online, get out of their way and make it as easy as possible for them to complete the transaction.
Thanks to Bill for providing an excellent case that illustrates this point.
(Two notes: I tweaked Bill’s comment for typos and clarity without changing the meaning. Also, I have an account with RegOnline and used them last year for an event I conducted. Consider myself disclosed.)
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March 8, 2007
Only at Freedom to Connect
I was at the Freedom to Connect conference earlier this week at the AFI Theater in Silver Spring, MD. The conference covered internet and telecom policy issues for hard core tech/policy geeks and had a who’s who of wonks, scientists, lobbyists and gurus in attendance. Even a member of Congress.
The time was ripe for one of the most surreal DC moments of my life to happen at this meeting:
FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein jamming on stage with Howard Levy, a world-renowned harmonica musician, while Scooter Libby’s conviction was reported in a chat channel projected 20 feet tall on the screen behind them. Woo!
I’ll post some of my notes and comments about the conference over the next couple of days.
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