BUSINESS

WEB 3.0

YRS OLD

left to right WEB MASTERS Forrest Hatfield, Mike Wiemholt, and Ben VanHoy

Since SLO LIFE Magazine was turning three years old, we decided to celebrate by getting ourselves a shiny, new website. We had stuck with the same site from the beginning and, after a few years of studying the analytics and understanding how visitors were using slolifemagazine.com, we felt wellinformed and able to make some smart changes. We learned quite a lot along the way and figured that you and your business may benefit a bit from our experience with the process.

The whole thing started with a visit to our website developer, San Luis

Obispo-based ITECH Solutions. Stepping into their offices, as we do from time-to-time, is oddly calming as you would think that their staff of ten would be frantically putting out digital fires in a constant state of panic. But, they’re not, and not much more than whirling computer fans and a symphony of mouse clicks can be detected in their space on El

Capitan Way. It looks like a highly professional call center with rows of cubicles, except no one is on the phone. Most of them, it turns out, are either developing websites or remotely monitoring client networks. >>

We filed into the conference room with notepads full of ideas and requirements for our next website when Forrest Hatfield, ITECH’s co-founder, settled in to his chair to talk things over. This was to be the beginning of the process, an hour-long initial consultation. Hatfield began by asking us what we liked and disliked about our site. While there was nothing entirely wrong with our website, the problem was that we felt that our magazine just didn’t look right online. Up to this point, we had been doing what most other publishers do: create an HTML version of their magazine, which is separate text and photos mainly so that the text is searchable. The benefit of doing it this way is that it encourages “organic search marketing.” For example, if someone goes to Google and searches “Rick Stollmeyer,” the chances are good that our “Meet Your Neighbor” article would pop up high on the results and lead the reader back to our site. When ITECH Solutions built our first website, they installed a bit of software code called Google Analytics. The program allows us to

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log on to find out all types of interesting information about visitors and this is how you can make an impact.” to our site. It tells us how many people visited and from where, whether they were unique visitors or stopped by multiple times. It Hatfield then breaks it down for us. “If you look back to 2010, for even shows us what pages they were looking at and how long they example, most of our clients were seeing visits to their websites from stayed. Pretty cool stuff. With Analytics, a free program, we were mobile devices at about 2% to 3%.” In other words, two or three able to determine that our subscription page was not converting as visits out of 100 to the websites ITECH managed were coming many leads as it should have been doing. In other words, it appears from people who were doing so from their smart phones or tablets. that people who were interested in buying a subscription would go “Today,” Hatfield continues, “depending on the site, it’s as much as in, enter their information, get confused or frustrated, and either leave the site or call us on the phone to place their order. Since we “Mobile is huge 30%.” It was imperative that, whatever we did, the website was conducive to mobile devices. He then shares another trend that ITECH had identified: are interested in continuing to expand our circulation, we wanted to make it much easier for visitors to buy a subscription on the site and right now and Google AdWords were becoming more expensive while also becoming less effective and they are witnessing first-hand that many of their clients are we told Hatfield and his team that improved functionality in this area should be central to getting bigger, returning to traditional media. After sharing the latest trends and strategies in website marketing, the redesign. When you talk to Hatfield, it is almost as if he and this is how Hatfield then goes on to explain the differences between responsive and reactive design and how both, in different ways, would make browsing is taking your words and breaking them up into little binary bits and bytes, “1’s” and “0’s,” for faster processing. More than just listening, which he you can make our site on a smart phone fast, efficient, and much more intuitive for future subscribers. He explained further that a new open source platform seems to do without moving a muscle with eyes wide open, it appears that he is downloading information, and doing it very quickly. Hatfield an impact.” made by Twitter called Bootstrap would be an ideal candidate to serve as the backbone for the redesign. “Sounds good,” we say. “Happy birthday and his partner, Brian Weiss, co-founded ITECH to us—let’s do it!” z web development and Weiss handles IT for the company. The pair, who met at now-defunct Computer Stuff became fast friends and wasted Since we are also in the business of visual communications, it has no time in finding a business they could do together. They looked at always been interesting to follow trends in website design and GUI developing software, but in the end they felt they had the most to (graphical user interface) presentation. The late 1990’s brought about offer to companies that were too small to hire their own in-house IT the ascendency of “Web 2.0,” which was the movement away from the guy or have the funds to hire a big name agency to develop a website. busy, information-packed, mostly read-only websites to a presentation Plus, as Hatfield points out, “When you have one company manage that was much cleaner and user-focused and, most importantly, included everything there is no finger pointing when things go wrong. We have a host of interactive features. Social media was borne out of Web 2.0 responsibility for everything, which also makes it better because we and the principles of the design revolution endure today. After Hatfield know how it all fits together.” encouraged us to spend time surfing the web to get design ideas, we then chose our favorites and a sent the links to ITECH along with notes Hatfield loads our current website onto a massive big-screen-TV- about what we liked about each site. turned-computer-monitor in the ITECH conference room and patiently hears us out and then makes a request. “Okay, what is it that A couple of weeks later we reconvened in the ITECH conference room. you want to accomplish with the redesign?” Without hesitation we tell The lights were turned off at the same time the big monitor came to Hatfield and his team that, first and foremost, we are looking to be life. On the screen was our new home page looking back at us. Instantly, more user-friendly and take care of visitors in one visit so they do not we knew that they nailed it. The presentation was clean, professional, have to take another step by placing a phone call or sending an email. yet unassuming just as we had asked. And, there was a big red button “Job one,” we tell them, “is the e-commerce aspect of the site—we have on the upper right-hand corner that simply said, “Subscribe.” As they to make it easier for people to buy a subscription online.” In addition navigated through the site, which was not yet live, it became apparent to wasting a lot of time for everyone involved, mostly, we wanted our to us how much we had learned over the last three years about how our subscribers to have a great experience on our site. The room falls silent visitors experienced slolifemagazine.com. And, together with our friends for a minute as Hatfield meticulously sketches on a sheet of blank at ITECH, we felt confident that the birthday present we had given office paper. He then spins the drawing around and says, “Here is what ourselves was also for everyone who would stop by our little corner of I think we ought to do. Mobile is huge right now and getting bigger, the world wide web. SLO LIFE