Taking our licks

If you've paid attention at all you know we just lanuched our new website. I think this is going to be such an amazing tool for ministry here.

First though we've got to work out some of the bugs. There were a few things that because we knew it so well we never realized how unfamiliar they would be to other people. So here's a couple of things we're hit on and how we're working to make them more clear.

Visitor/Perimeter Family/myperimeter:

We created three different sections to our site. Really three complete sites. One for visitors with all the top-level-before-you-get-here information. This is our main url. The family section has all the deep ministry information. It's what you think of when you think of the site. We tried very hard to keep the site shallow to help navigatbility. Never more than four layer: home>ministry category>ministry>ministry subpage. Myperimeter is a personalized content site like myyahoo! or igoogle.

People are having a very hard time figuring out where they are. They land on the homepage and can't find ministry links. We've received this coment a couple of times: You have a lot of great information for visitors but where is ____ ministry.

So we're adding a new homepage that lays out the three site and directs them to the one for them. As much as I hate splash pages this is one extra click to get people where they want to go and maintain the visitor/family experiences.

Downloads:

We're having a few problems with very random downloads on some operating systems. So random we're having a hard time tracking it. It is becoming an increasing problem though. See my post on PDF's and Vista for more on this.

Week at a glance:

On our old site we had this page of things coming up this week including who was preaching and leading worship. I way undervalued how important that was. Not so much sure why but it is. 

We adding back the link from our e-newsletter, the pulse, which is where most people found it.

There are about 100 other smaller things that we've seen and taken care of since our launch last month. Here's a post we recently put on our intranet for our staff describing some of the bigger, small things.30 Day Update

 

Changes Made:

• Within the first week of the site we doubled the number of pages on the site – and maintained an average of less than 24 hours to make changes and corrections.
  
• In the first 48 hours:
  
• We had ~1,800 visitors
  
• Visiting ~20,000 pages
  
• Averaging 10.65 pages per visit
  
• While staying on the site an average of 6.5 minutes (600% the industry average).
  
• We have added password protection capabilities for sections of the site, specific pages, groups, and files.
  
• Enhanced our Content Management tool with a “duplicate page” option to make it easier to create new pages.
  
• Completely overhauled the MyPerimeter login and Create a Group process per feedback and suggestions.
  
• Added the “remember me” feature so you get “Welcome ________” when you login to MyPerimeter.
  
• More than 20 ministries have been featured on the Perimeter Family home page scrolling window.
  
• More of you are using the “Change Request” feature to manage content then doing it yourself.  
  

Coming Soon:

• We are increasing the visibility of our Search and Feedback options.
  
• We are creating a new Home Page in order to correct the confusion between the Visitor experience and the Perimeter Family experience.
  
• Improved navigation via new links on the Perimeter Family home page.