Danielle Williams

Whew!

That was quite the blog salon – information-rich and engaging, just like a good website should be.

Thanks for coming along with us as we shared some of the knowledge we learned during the recent overhaul of AmericansForTheArts.org.

From start to finish, we covered everything you’ll need to know before you take on a web project:

• How to Build a Winning Website
• The First 3 Steps to Your New Website
• Content is King
• 10 Ways to Improve The Website You Already Have
• Getting Buy-In for Your Website Redesign
• How to Pick the Best Partners
• 5 Documents You Need for a Successful Website Redesign
• Can I Play, Too? Involving Staff Members in the Web Content Creation Process
• The Design Process: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
• Learning Website Lingo on the Fly
• Kick Your Content Up a Notch with Multimedia
• 5 Reasons You Should Launch a Website in “Beta”

To wrap up this blog salon, we wanted to share an infographic we created that shows some great milestones that our website has hit during the first 4 months since launch.

As you can see, our infographic is split in three sections:

The Users section specifically shows:

• the growth in the number of total users on our site
• the increased time that returning users (people who have been to our website previously) spend on our new site compared to our old one
• the various ways that people find (or are “referred to”) our website (i.e. Google, social media, etc.)

Our Mobile section frames the same kind of statistics on traffic and users, but specifically shows information for those who access our site on mobile devices (tablets, phones, etc.). We’re happy to see an overall increase in users visiting our website on mobile devices, and we’ll use that to propel us toward more mobile-friendly capabilities!

The Pages section shows an increase in page views (which counts each time a page of our website is visited) between the new website and the old site. This increase is especially interesting once you take the final graphic into account, since we were able to use dynamic functionality to drastically reduce the number of total webpages on our website without compromising content. Doing that not only made our site easier to manage, but our new, optimized way of structuring content also made it more engaging for users – even though our new website has ¼ of the pages that our old site had, it has seen 62% more page views.

Last but not least, it’s time for us to put our money where our mouth is – after harping on feedback all week, we’d love to get yours! Please take a moment to visit the new AmericansForTheArts.org, and then take our survey to let us know what you think!

A huge thank-you to my wonderful team who contributed posts this week: Kimberly Hedges (Vice President of Marketing, Communications and Technology), Joshua Jenkins (Website Coordinator), Raheem Dawodu (Website and New Media Associate), Caitlin Holland (Communications and Content Manager), and Elizabeth Van Fleet (Manager of Publications and Communication).

And please feel free to reach out to us – we’d love to help answer any questions, or, if we don’t know the answer, hopefully point you in the right direction!

We are so proud of the work we accomplished as a team, and we hope that you now feel inspired to build your own winning website!