The key objectives were to:
- Provide information and advice to young people (13-19 year age
range) in Southend-on-Sea
- Extend a network of social media marketing touch points
- Provide a central website to act as a portal to further
information and third party websites
Excited as we were at the thought of producing a website to
target this particular user base, we were aware that they were
possibly an unforgiving audience. We needed to ensure the overall
tone of the site was neither condescending nor patronising.
However, we were buoyed by the fact that we could safely assume
this audience were very comfortable with communicating and
conversing over the web.
A number of other factors, however, presented challenges.
Firstly, this was a new website on a new immature domain name. We
needed to work quickly to establish the domain and ensure that it
could be easily found on search engines and maximise inbound
traffic numbers from search queries. For this reason, levels of
traffic to the new website would be one of the key indicators of
success.
Secondly, it was crucial that Connexions were able to manage the
website content for themselves and make those all important regular
updates to the site's content. Where Connexions themselves were
producing marketing materials in-house, they did not have technical
HTML skills. Any solution presented would need to provide the
ability to administer their site through a suite of non-technical
content management tools.
We decided to build the website using Umbraco CMS, since it
provides a very user-friendly suite of web content management
tools. Umbraco also provides an excellent platform for SEO (search
engine optimisation) work and is happy working with web standards
compliant, validated XHTML mark-up.
Crucially, Umbraco additionally provides the opportunity to
easily integrate feeds from third party social networking sites. As
part of Connexion's web strategy, using an extended network of
social media websites provided the benefits of firstly,
incorporating the technical know-how of such content partners, but
also cast an extended net across the Internet providing additional
opportunities to reach their audience.
For example, the photo sharing web service called Flickr was
used to upload and store photos taken of Southend Connexion's
events. Through the aggregation of Flickr's RSS feed, we were able
to include their photos directly within the Connexion's website.
Further, Connexions were able to benefit from the social facilities
provided by Flickr, namely community feedback and that Flickr
photos could also be shared on other bookmarking sites, thus
providing a route back to the Connexion's website.
To further complete this loop of interaction, the new website
includes the facility to share site content externally with social
networking sites. If a user finds any information of interest, they
can share it with sites such as Facebook and Twitter simply by
clicking a "share this" button positioned on every page of the
website.
To ensure successful indexing of the site and its content with
Google (and other search engines) we created an XML sitemap. An
XML sitemap details the site's entire page structure in machine
readable code that search engines prefer to process when indexing a
website within their pages. The sitemap was then registered
directly with Google and was quickly downloaded and processed. This
has allowed us to rapidly establish the site within Google's SERPs
(search engine results pages) under key search phrases, in this
case principally "Southend Connexions".
Surprisingly there was already a number of natural listing, i.e.
free listings, sites competing for this search term. We are now
positioned second in the results lists, with this being achieved
within only a couple of weeks of going live. This ensures that we
are highly visible to our searching audience.
Google Analytics has been installed to allow us to track how the
site is being used, how often this is and where users are coming
from. The website has quickly seen traffic levels grow in excess of
1000 monthly unique visits within just a short period. The origins
of the overall traffic is a combination of search engine referrals,
unique hits generated from pamphlets and materials, and further
referrals from the extended network of social media touch
points.
Southend Connexions continue to develop the website, with
refined focus being on events for their audience to participate in,
and specialist job listings for young people. With the site's
architecture being provided by Umbraco and the ASP.NET framework,
it remains flexible to accommodate further developments and rapidly
extending services to incorporate any new marketing campaigns.