Greetings ExtremeMarkover.org participants, volunteers, teachers and students!
If you’ve been following along with this community based effort, then you may have asked yourself if we bailed on this Extreme Markover project. We haven’t, but we are taking a methodical approaches to the project and for good reason.
Taking the advice of seasoned Web professional Lance Loveday, Lance Loveday CEO Closed Loop Marketing we decided to run Web Analytics on the current CommunityVoices website and we were surprised by the results.
As you may recall, Lance suggested that we:
- Implement Google Analytics ASAP – even before the redesign, as gathering some baseline data in that tool prior to the redesign will make the Before/After analysis go much smoother. It’s easy, free and extremely powerful. We recommend all clients install it, even if they’re already using another analytics system as well.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
As a result, we followed the advice of Lance to the tee and we’ve been patiently waiting for the stats. It’s been 60 days and the truth is we haven’t seen any traffic. As a result, we want to include search marketing into our design process. What this will mean is that we will need a follow up to the client (Community Voices) to find out their thoughts. Ideally, as Web professionals we support our clients with Web marketing as well as design. I’m hopeful that working together with the client (just as in real life) we can strategise on the next steps improving the trafffic and delivery of their valuable community services.
From a lesson plan perspective, I’ll be interviewing an ExtremeMarkover.org Web professional volunteer to explore his/her recommendations on next steps and whether or not this is a common situation when dealing with small business or non profit clients.
