This is our fourth of five check-ins on progress for our web team goals.
1. Reduce the total number of pages on the Lane website by 5% (from 5550 to 5273)
Regretfully, this number has slid up since last check-in, from 4948 to 5003. There’s a couple of things behind this: there’s been an unusually high number of news releases, we’ve added pages to support our new slideshows, and we just had a training. There’s still 18 open tasks on our tracker about eliminating pages, so there’s still hope we’ll improve further by our final check-in. But our primary lesson is that we need to improve how we count our public pages – training pages, which no one can see, aren’t really hurting anyone, and we should really stop tracking our progress on them.
2. Reduce the number of pages with more than 15,000 characters by 10% (from 249 to 224)
Somehow, this measure also increased slightly, from 136 pages to 141 pages. Usually, these pages are minutes from meetings. Lesson learned: we need an intranet.
3. Reduce the average character count of our pages by 10% (from 4650 to 4185)
Sadly, this measure has also increased a bit, from 3966 to 4058. As mentioned last goal, this goal is no longer really one of our goals, as we’re deliberately using some longer form content.
4. Improve the average age of our pages (the average late updated date) by 4 months (from 16 months to 12 months)
We’ve stayed steady on this goal since last post, staying at 17 months old. This is one of our most difficult tasks: please help us out! If you look at the listing of pages in your site from the right sidebar on the dashboard, under “Sites I’m responsible for”, you can sort that by updated date. Take a look at some of your older pages; you might be surprised by how out of date they can be.
Traffic Goals
We also had two traffic goals:
- Increase session counts for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 3,228,904 to 3,390,349
- Decrease the bounce rate for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 37.05% to 35.19%
Since these are annual goals, they’re a little harder to compare against. But we can compare similar time periods. For the first eight months, 6/14-2/14, comparing 2016/17 to 2017/18, our session counts have decreased by 11.13%, and our bounce rate has shrunk by 0.01%. This is a bit of an improvement on our bounce rate, but our session counts remain crushing. A glimmer of hope: new sessions are up 7.76%, and average session duration is up 7.98%.
We’re still seeing positive returns from some of the pages we’ve redeveloped. If you work on the website of an academic program, and you’d like to dramatically update your pages, please send us an email. We’ll get in touch about how you can get in the queue for content rewrites. We’re hoping to launch our next redesigned program very soon.