Even though we are a significantly smaller organisation than most of our customers, we went through many of the same problems you’ve told us about throughout the years in 2009. We’ve gone through a not-fully-completed redesign, changed CMS, merged a few domains into one site, spent more time on content strategy and experimented with video, Twitter, Facebook and other exciting new tools.
You might also be reviewing your web activities. Here is a summary of our online activities in 2009, which can hopefully act as inspiration for your activities and 2010 planning.
The big change on the website was the improved graphical design, which was revealed on the jboye.com site in time for the November conference. We’ve gone through several iterations with improvements since then and are now planning to use the same design on our Danish site in early 2010. Behind the scenes we have been very happy with WordPress as our main platform and when the Danish site is redesigned it will move from eZ Publish and save us money on hosting as well as make training easier in one system .
Traffic has been on an upward trend during 2009; from approx. 500 visitors a week early in the year to approx. 1,000 a week late in the year. Google alone sends about 30% of visitors, with Twitter at 4% and LinkedIn at 3% of referrals. Facebook sends 1% of visitors and Microsoft’s Bing comes with less than 1%. A traffic increase alone is not necessarily helpful, but in 2009 we started using campaigns to keep better track of the effectiveness of our newsletter, banners and traffic from partners. We use Google Analytics as our measurement tool, and it has been perfectly adequate for our requirements thus far.
We only launched the J. Boye blog in 2008. We published 31 postings in 2008, but managed 150 peer-reviewed postings in 2009. Each posting received on average about 4 comments, which we had 565 of in total (up from 45 in 2008). In general, the comments are excellent and I’ve learned much from the insightful contributions from our readers. Unfortunately, in terms of returning commentary, we’ve been less good at commenting on other blogs.
The most popular topics on our blog were CMS selection, SharePoint and Sitecore and the most popular individual postings were
- Who should be on your CMS shortlist?
- Will Umbraco rule the CMS world?
- 10 online professionals to watch on Twitter in 2009
From a business perspective, the blog certainly takes precious time to maintain and keep alive, but also generates serious interest in our community of practice and conferences. The blog also helps sell copies of our research; in 2009 released papers on web strategy and CMS selection. We decided to give away the research free of charge to members and their colleagues and to manage the process, we quickly created a Google Docs form, which worked well and was easy to set up.
Video was a new experiment at our European conference in Aarhus in November. Powered by the friendly people at 23 Video, many of the conference videos have attracted a surprisingly high number of viewers. In particular the Web Idol footage seems popular. One can only hope this will lead to better demos in 2010.
We joined Twitter in 2009. We’ve been maintaining our corporate account at @jboye and several individual accounts, e.g. @janusboye, @nissenpeter and @psejersen with steady activity. In the beginning we set up an automatic tweet on our corporate account every time we released a new blog, but turned this off again to gain better control of the text with the 140 character limitation. See examples of old automatic tweet and new manual tweet. Twitter has been a very helpful tool in terms of getting input for member questions or to crowd-source ideas for a blog posting.
On LinkedIn we launched a J. Boye group exclusively for practitioners, which to date has managed to attract 265 members. A recent discussion was on US design firms with SharePoint experience, which to my positive surprise received a number of useful responses within a few hours even though most of our members are still based in Europe.
Do leave a comments and share your ideas for 2010. And many thanks to all for sharing your views and guidance throughout a challenging 2009.
