Funky Venues operated in a competitive market. Their search engine rankings were loosing ground. It took too many clicks to reach content. And they needed to expand the site adding new areas for suppliers, offers and competitions and company information.
The most amount of technical work went into designing the suppliers’ profile pages (Fig. iii). Every venue, supplier, caterer and entertainer listing required many fields and variables including: cross-linked special offers, section and homepage highlighting, geographical text and map locations, downloadable vCards, and booking and email-a-friend forms.
An area of the system was also developed for the fornightly newsletter (Fig. iv). It was designed so that all previously published news, offers, venue or supplier profiles could be easily added. Following the mailout, each newsletter would be automatically archived and available on the site.
The most quantifiable part of the brief was to increase search engine rankings. To do this we carefully planned the site’s navigation, the content for section and category landing pages, canonical URL segments, header titles, page titles and body copy.
As a result, unique visits increased by 145% after six months since the launch of the new site. While year on year, unique visits went up by 215%, pages per view went down by 50%, and time spent increased by 25%. Bounce rates dropped to 16%.
Leevi Graham cleverly integrated Mint’s stat tracking into the system to generate reports for each supplier. And Caterina Chimenti spent a lot of time getting the frames and images spot on.