Andrew Gormley

As promised, here is the first of a multi-part series that goes through the process of realigning my site not only to better address my target audience, but to also tackle issues that I’ve noticed or had to work around since the initial launch (over a year and a half ago). These principals could be applied to any type of site you work on, albeit corporate, personal, or otherwise. I hope the method and information you find here proves useful.

Preface

It would probably help if you read Cameron Moll’s most excellent article Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign on A List Apart before continuing with this or any other article in the series.

Establishing The Audience

The first thing I always do in situations where a realign is in order is check Google Analytics as well as my server log files (in this case, via Urchin) to get an idea of what people are up to when they come to my site. I decided to also check the main RSS feed to see if people are consuming content that way, since that’s usually how I like to manage my information intake.

Using the window of time April 5th, 2009 to April 5th, 2010, here are the a few points that I’ve gleaned:

• Average unique visitors per day: 52
• Average pageviews per day: 137
• Average bounce rate: 72.2%
• Average time spent on site: 00:01:54
• Average pages per visit: 2.34
• Current number of RSS subscribers: 230
• Average number of RSS subscribes: 137

Sadly, that was more traffic than I expected to be receiving on a day-to-day basis due to my sporadic updating and varying types of content. The bounce rate is definitely something that needs to be addressed, as 72% is pretty terrible any way you present it. More often than not bounce rate is tied to usability issues: unclear navigation, display issues, and much more can all factor in to bounce rate. I like that there are actually RSS subscribers, even though it was difficult information for me to ascertain. I may end up implementing FeedBurner for the RSS feed simply as a way of more easily tracking who has subscribed to the site.

Next up, I want to see what my user’s capabilities are. This includes everything from their web browser to screen resolution to operating system. The numbers were pretty much on par with what I thought they’d be:

Then I decided to break down the top three browsers into their respective version numbers to gain a little more insight into who’s been checking in:

The site is optimized for all but two browser versions featured above: IE 5.5 and 6. It’s almost mind boggling to think that anyone in 2009 or 2010 has used Internet Explorer 5.5 – those folks are outliers and won’t be considered as part of my target audience. I’ve also already made it clear that IE6 isn’t supported on any current or future incarnations of my site. Currently, users of those browsers can still view my site content; moving forward with the new design they’ll be presented with a polite splash page encouraging them to get with the program.

What was really surprising were the amount of visitors using the latest version of Safari. The 23% of users running version 3 were from April 2009 to roughly July 2009 (Safari 4 was released in June). In the past 6 months, nearly 96% of all Safari visitors are running the most current build. I suppose that’s the benefit of proactively pushing out updates to your users (Microsoft, take note!).

Here are a few of the other stats worth noting:

• Operating systems were split pretty evenly between Mac and Windows (both roughly 46%). Some surprises in the OS list include: PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and Blackberry
• Most common screen resolution is 1280×800. Smallest screen resolution (not including mobile) was 1024×768.

To Sum It All Up

My everyday visitor is running a recent version of Firefox or the most current version of Safari on a Mac or Windows PC with an average resolution of 1280×800, making it safe to assume they’re using a laptop. If they don’t leave immediately from the homepage, they tend to browse at least 2 pages of the site, spending roughly 1 minute on each page.

Moving Forward

In my next entry, I’ll start to address the goals of the site and what messaging (if any) I’d like to change to better convey what it is I offer. This will likely also touch on a bit of branding as well, though the only visuals we’ll be working with will most likely be graphs. Look for that article coming soon.