All year we’ve been tracking progress on our web team goals. But now the year is over, and it’s time to reflect. We definitely made a lot of progress on some of our goals, but on others there’s only bad news.
1. Reduce the total number of pages on the Lane website by 5% (from 5550 to 5273)
We exceeded this goal, reducing the total number of pages by 18.3%, rather than just 5%. But it turns out this was not a well written goal. Of the 1,018 of pages we eliminated, 558 of them were Lane in the News items, which aren’t really pages at all.
This goal had a problem with language versus measurement. Drupal stores content internally as “nodes”. This is fairly easy to count – select count(*) from node. But there’s a number of types of content on the website that aren’t really pages but are nodes. Lane in the News items are one type, but we also have slideshow slides, FAQ questions, and landing page announcements. So while those content types count for the purposes of our metric, they probably shouldn’t.
Fortunately, we still deleted 460 actual pages, so we handily met this goal. But if we set a goal like this again, we’ll probably exclude certain content types (not only the ones previously mentioned, but also news releases and board policies).
2. Reduce the number of pages with more than 15,000 characters by 10% (from 249 to 224)
While we certainly met this goal, this count has increased yet again, from 144 pages last check-in to 145. These pages remain mostly meeting minutes and policy documents. If we do a goal like this again, we should probably limit what content types we look at.
It’d be really nice if there were an easy way to count words, rather than characters, but that ends up being a very difficult problem, especially when our content includes HTML mixed in.
3. Reduce the average character count of our pages by 10% (from 4650 to 4185)
For reasons similar to goal #2, we should probably have limited what content types we looked at. We wound up at 4,194 characters, which is close to our goal. This is likely not a goal we’ll continue though, as longer form content isn’t necessarily a terrible idea.
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, at 17 months old. This remains one of our most difficult tasks. Despite the web team making more than 3,000 page revisions in the last year, more than 20% of the pages on the website haven’t been edited in more than 3 years – and many of the revisions we made were just link changes or typos. We’re often not qualified to do content changes. Please give us a hand!
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%
Unfortunately, we met neither of these goals. We fell the furthest behind on pageviews, where we fell 14.24%. We did improve our bounce rate by 1.11%, but that’s a long way from our 5% goal. We did have a couple of wins, which seem to indicate a more engaged audience. Average session duration is longer, people are viewing more pages per session, more sessions are from new visitors, and organic search traffic is up.
In retrospect, while these were a good first attempt at goals, future goals should be more carefully targeted to what we’re trying to accomplish on the web at Lane. For instance, we could look at the percentages of traffic that come via organic search or referral, or we could look at tracking the percentage of people who request information about the college.