My site and (other) blog

If you still haven't seen my site, go check it out at Jared Walker Design. Also, you may have noticed that I haven't been posting much here. That's partly because I've been posting on my other blog. I'll probably post mostly on that blog from now on.

Web Analytics Strategy

I recently participated in BYU’s web analytics competition. The competition is put on by Omniture each semester, and the purpose is to analyze a company's analytics data and then give the company suggestions on how it can use that data to achieve its goals. The company that we looked at for this semester was BackcountryOutlet.com. It’s a site where Backcountry.com sells its discounted merchandise—outdoor gear from previous seasons and other sales items.

So let me explain my strategy for the competition. Since BackcountryOutlet is an eCommerce site, I figured that its main business goal is to earn revenues. And since it’s also an outlet, it wants to get rid of old inventory (which is why it’s selling items at discount). My strategy was to look at suggestions dealing with conversion (getting the people that are already coming to the site to make purchases). I could have looked at other things such as reach (advertising to prospective visitors) or acquisition (getting people to the site), but I wanted to focus on conversion because I figured it was better to convert the people already coming to the site before trying to get more people there. So my high-level strategy was mostly looking at ways to improve the site to lead to higher conversion (my low-level strategy involved success events and KPI’s, but I won’t bore you with the details).

As a side note, I went into the competition with some experience in analytics, having used free tools like Google Analytics and StatCounter. But I had never used Omniture’s SiteCatalyst before. SiteCatalyst is very sophisticated. You can get lost in the tool if you don’t know what you’re looking for or how to look for it. So I had an idea of what I wanted to do with the analytics, but I didn’t know how to use the tool.

Well, it ended up that I got sick for a week during the competition and I didn’t get to put as much time into it as I wanted. I did come out of the competition with some good experience though. I did a lot of studying and research into analytics, and I familiarized myself with the SiteCatalyst tool. I’ll be much more prepared for the competition when it comes around next semester.

Good Content for SEO

Having good content on your site (or blog) is a very important part of search engine optimization (SEO). It's one of the best ways to get long term success in search engine rankings. You get that success through backlinks and repeat visitors. For those of you not really worried about SEO, let me put it in different terms--you'll get more visitors to your site, and you'll keep them coming back for more.

So first, what do I mean by good content? I mean that the articles, posts, and the things you talk about on your site should be four things: (1) unique, (2) useful, (3) enjoyable, and (4) frequently updated.

Unique
If your content isn't unique, then people don't have to come to your site to see it. They can go to a different site that has the same basic content. So when you create content for your site, make sure it's something unique that can't be found all over the Web. Then people will come to your site for that content.

Useful
If your content isn't useful, then it doesn't really serve a purpose. Maybe that's a good question to ask yourself when creating content--what is the purpose of this content? Is it to answer a question that people have? Is it to gather a lot of relevant links or ideas from several different places into one article? If your content is useful, people will read it.

Enjoyable
I like to read articles and posts that are entertaining and/or interesting. Is your article funny, or does it talk about an interesting topic? Write articles that people will enjoy reading.
I think some of the spelling/grammar/layout rules fall into this category too. If your spelling or grammar is bad, it can be distracting. Edit your article before you post it. If the layout is a huge block of unending text, people won't even start reading. Split it up into sections with headings and perhaps some images.

Frequently Updated
Keep your content fresh. Keep adding new content. If you have a blog, try to post often so that you don't lose your readers. People will stop coming to your blog if you don't keep posting on it. On sites other than blogs, keep adding new articles, tutorials, or whatever your content is. New content keeps people coming back, and it opens up new pages to be indexed by search engines.

Here's an example of a blog that I've been visiting lately because it has good content. It's called the Freelance Folder. The subject material is very relevant and useful to me as a freelance web designer. The links that they post to other articles and blogs are also very useful. And most of the posts are fairly interesting.


So I hope you've learned a thing or two about content and how it fits in with search engine optimization. In summary, if you have good content, people will read it.

Marauder's Map

Remember the Marauder's Map from the Harry Potter movies? It's the map that shows you where people are at Hogwarts--you can see a banner (pennant) with the person's name on it and footsteps on the map showing where the person is walking.

Anyways, when I saw the map I thought to myself, I wonder if I could do that in Flash? So I tried it out. Actually, it turned out to probably be more trouble than it was worth, but I finished it and learned a few things at the same time.

The animation is just me walking around and stopping. You can see it here. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Rat Monster

Okay, so here's a funny post. It's my favorite video clip from scare tactics.

3d Art

Even though I'll be posting about web analytics now, I also still want to do some design-related posts. Here are some pictures of 3d pavement art done by Julian Beever. These are some of the ones that I thought were really cool.





Here's the artist's website in case you want to see more: Julian Beever.

New Blog

Well, I wasn't using this blog much before, so I'm turning it into a web analytics blog. I'm taking a web analytics class in school this semester and each of us is going to be keeping a blog and running analytics with it as well. For those of you who don't know what web analytics is, here's a definition from Wikipedia:

"Web analytics is the study of the behaviour of website visitors."

So basically, people want to know what visitors are doing on their site. How many people come to the site? How do they get to the site? What pages are they visiting? What links are they clicking, or what products are they looking at?

People use tools to find out these sort of things. Omniture is a huge player in the web analytics market, but their tools cost money. Some examples of free tools are Google Analytics, StatCounter, and SiteMeter.

So what's my purpose for taking this web analytics class? I'm very interested in web design and development. I've used a bit of analytics on my own sites with Google Analytics and StatCounter, but I want to learn more. This is a fairly new and rapidly growing field, and one that I think is very interesting and useful. Hopefully I'll be able to use the things I learn in this class in the future, either while working for a company or for my own eCommerce site.