Our external home page is the single most important page on our website. It is usually the first page people see on the University of Bath site and it is the page people use to form initial perceptions about us.
In the last year alone we had 4,306,827 external views on the page (roughly 360,000) per month.
Some key facts
- From our homepage at least 28% of our visitors go to Undergraduate and 9% to Postgraduate (NB. This does not take into account people using the search directly which accounts for a high proportion of our traffic).
- The 6th most popular keyword used to find us is in Chinese.
Developing the new homepage
We began the homepage re-design project in the latter part of 2010. Given its importance we consciously didn't just dive into design work but focused on researching what we wanted the page to achieve. The stages of development are outlined below:
Stages of development
Stage 1: Analysis and research
Review
- Where are we now? – Analysis of the current homepage links.
Research
- Competitor Research - review of 20 competitor sites (looked at types of information, number of links etc.)
- Google Analytics (how people used the homepage, popular links)
- Crazy Egg (reviewed heat maps to see where people clicked on the current page)
- General research - other information from various sources (articles about university websites published in journals and newspapers)
- Goal Setting for the Home Page
- Suggestions from Research
- Home Page link options
Conclusions
- Developed a list of New External Home Page Links - with explanations
- Developed a guide; How to measure home page success
Stage 2: Design iterations and feedback
- Developed a number of designs for discussion with Web Services and Faculty/School Web Editors
- Gained feedback from several Senior Stakeholders
- Gained feedback from focus groups within local schools
Stage 3: Build, (user) test and seek additional feedback
- Developed a working page
- Test the page with a variety of users (including our PG students)
- Made modifications based on user testing and feedback
- Presented page to our Vice-Chancellors-Group (VCG)
- (Soft) launched page
The homepage has now been soft launched and will replace our existing page later this week.
Jez Cope
The new homepage looks really good! Thanks for sharing this insight into the development process. Would you consider making the 'How to measure home page success' guide available, either publicly or just within the university?
March 16, 2011 at 4:02 pm
Alex
Looking good, but at present it now feels like there's about 4 different styles of website online, and I hope these are going to be unified into one! Theres the old style pages, this new home page, the study/research style pages (these are my fav - why does the new homepage not match up with these properly?) and also the older test style of the 'students' home page. Surely the aim of the redesign, and the key to success, is a simple unified design. It's all a little chaotic at present, but is certainly looking promising for the future! Keep up the good work!
March 16, 2011 at 11:38 pm
Alison Kerwin
Jez - Thanks for your comments. We had a few questions about measuring homepage success so we've added a new blog post which explains more about it.
Alex - All of the design work has been done in-house. We didn't have the luxury of stopping all our other work to concentrate on this project so the new templates have been through several iterations. The ones you see on Study and Research are here to stay and we're updating the others as we go through and re-shape the content/architecture. The homepage has been designed to complement the new templates but as it is a standalone we felt it should feel a little bit different.
It certainly is chaotic at present. We have a site with over 250,000 pages to work on so it's not a quick job but we are getting there.
March 17, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Alex
I can appreciate it must be a huge task to undertake, and great work so far! Really good design, I do like the new feel and I look forward to this design spreading throughout the rest of the old pages! I just felt it would make more sense for the homepage to blend more precisely with the other main pages - always feels a bit odd to me when the navigation links jump over the place when you're switching pages on a site. Still, great work, keep it up!
March 17, 2011 at 10:13 pm