A Cincinnati Enquirer internal report says pageviews fell to 32.4 million last month from 39.3 million in August 2007, the Porkopolis blog says. It attributes the fall to the new GO4 website template adopted this summer, the same template rolled out across Gannett, meant to make it easier to sell advertising across all the company's sites. "Many readers, though, have said the layout is confusing and pages take too long to load,'' Porkopolis says.
What happened to your site's traffic after adopting the template? Please post your replies in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write gannettblog[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the green sidebar, upper right.
Earlier: New website design lowers, slows traffic
Monday, September 15, 2008
11 comments:
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Jim, GO4 Multimedia has nothing whatsoever to do with the GO4 redesign, which stands for "Gannett Online version 4." The previous online design specs were known as "GO3," etc.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, immediately after redesign, we took a big dip, then began pulling out of it a month later. At this point we're up a significant amount on weekly unique visitors but down on number of visits per user, so page views are up on average, but not by a lot.
Traffic wise there's good and bad. Mostly bad, but the good's very good and hopefully the bad is just temporary.
ReplyDeleteMost sites have seen either an abrupt downturn in traffic or slower growth, but also enormous and rapid positive changes in metrics that historically have been really, really hard to change: nighttime usage, dwell time and usage by 18-34, all of which are going up quickly and a lot due to the new social networking tools. So that's good, and regular traffic should pick up as GMTI and local site sort out the bugs and enhance things.
The concepts of the redesign aren't bad: the problems seem to be related to execution, mostly by corporate but also by local markets.
Slow pages, buggy tools, buggy ads, super-annoying national ads, an overemphasis on search tools not ready for prime time, an overemphasis on Pluck tools not ready for primetime, confining navigation and a lot of space-inefficiency that makes using the sites more work to use -- these are all legitimate problems and faults, and most of them relate to the decisions made by corporate planners or implementers, the local markets not so much.
A lot of corporate folks defensively emphasize that redesigns yield traffic losses and user complaints -- without seeming to realize that's not always the case. Good redesigns make users happy and traffic rebounds aggressively after any short-term post-redesign dips. There are thousands of examples of that.
The thing that bothers me the most about GO4 is that the people at Digital don't SEEM to accept any responsibility for the problems they've caused, and they generally don't seem to acknowledge publicly that they've laid an egg.
The GO4 stuff basically was the indicator to me, a young digital person, the kind of person the company's trying to keep, that it's time to check out. Gannett's capable of great things, but if my future and career options are going to be defined by the work of the people up there, and GO4 is their best work, I'm probably wasting my time here.
ReplyDeleteIt used to be that the site I worked on had a lot of great things that looked awesome in my portfolio. Now when I am on the phone with a recruiter calling me or a prospective employer and they call up the Web site, I can hear in their voice they're totally unimpressed. Same when I'm out and about and I tell people where I work.
Basically, I'm on the market now and will depart Gannett as soon as I get an acceptable offer. Thank you, GO4!
I dislike the universal Gannett webpage template. It is dull and boring, ugly and unwieldy.
ReplyDeleteThere are ugly spaces between story blurbs. Pages download slowly because there is too much business on each one. I despise the videos that load themselves and start by themselves.
It is difficult to find stories that were played on inside pages. The archive is shallow. Ad links don't always work.
having the blogs on the news page is annoying, especially since many of them are of such poor quality. The reader photo galleries are given the same weight/value as those from the photojournalists, an insult to everyone.
Compared to what the staff of many papers came up with on their own, this one size fits all web page design is just DISMAL.
11:25 AM: Agreed, and well said. Alas.
ReplyDeleteTraffic fell 10,000 - 20,000 uniques per day -- we were in the upper 40s/low 50s daily, and we dropped to the low 30s for a LONG time. Finally growing back to the upper 30s on a regular basis. Trended stats look terrible. The only place we're doing better is with video because it's easier to find.
ReplyDeleteGO4 is mega-slow. Nothing works as it should. Site looks different in Firefox and IE but we are forced to develop in IE and HOPE it looks good in Firefox.
(I am posting from a broadcast market, which Gannett doesn't care about anyway.)
Well, 11:25 am - did you ever think that maybe there's a good reason to put reader content above yours?
ReplyDeleteJudging from our traffic, at least, that's what our idiot readers want to read and see - so I say give it to them.
The first thing traditional journalists need to do to keep this business afloat is stop insisting the "professional" stuff is what people want. We wish they did, but they don't. Get over it.
I think readers want to read the best stories possible and view the best photos ever.
ReplyDeleteAll the pet cat photos in the world, while having a great deal of meaning to Fluffy's owner, don't deserve better play that a breaking news or feature photo by any of Gannett's shooters.
And giving play to vanity bloggers who pour a stream of ignorance is outrageous. These aren't citizen reporters. They're a fact check nightmare.
Count the comments.
I used to freelance for Gannett, but mostly come here as someone interested in the newspaper business.
ReplyDeleteI used to read the Des Moines Register and Pacific Daily News websites every day (I used to live in each place) but, because of all the problems listed here (slow, buggy, etc.), I rarely visit either anymore.
Both papers had better websites before they were standardized. I wrote to the IT departments and told them as much.
Interesting post elsewhere claiming some places are paying people to "participate" on I believe they said the Moms site.
ReplyDeleteIf that's true, does Gannett report the paid clicks the same as the non-paid clicks?
I was wondering the same thing about the clicks. Seems weird if they do count the paid clicks.
ReplyDelete