eBC Case Study

Before (2002)

After (2006)

Website Assessments

• The space allotted for information on a web page has value, depending upon where it appears in relation to other information and whether it appears “above or below” the fold.The concept of above and below the fold is used in web design, referring to location of an item near the top of a web page, which can thus be viewed in a browser without scrolling.
• One aspect of redesigning the website was an assessment of the value of information presented in relation to where it appeared on the page. This assessment was first made based upon how the eBC staff projected what the needs of the visitors to the website would be. Therefore, they determined that seminar listings, for example, would be placed in a higher position on the main page while sponsor logos would be removed and placed on a separate page.

• After the redesign and the site was launched eBC staff used a component of Google Analytics called Site Overlay to track user activities on the website. Site Overlay is a very useful feature of Google Analytics. It displays your web pages superimposed with click and conversion data for each link. It shows you exactly where people are clicking on each page. This is exceptionally useful for determining if your page layout and site navigation is working correctly: if your visitors are going where you want them to go. Site Overlay confirmed that users were, in fact, viewing the information nearest the fold and the top of the page more frequently, thereby ensuring a more efficient discovery of information.

• User Surveys - In an effort to collect statistical information to be used to enhance our products and services eBC installed an open source survey application called PHPSurveyor (http://www.phpsurveyor.org).  Using this application, eBC has created a variety of survey’s which are accessible from a link on the eBC website or from a link on an email targeted to specific parties. From the results of these surveys, eBC has adjusted the delivery time and content of some seminars to better serve its clients.

Website Accessibility

• Navigation should be consistent between bages on a website. eBC made sure that the new website has the same pulldown menus at the top of each page, a page specific table of contents on the left side of each page and static links at the bottom of the page that can be used as alternates to the menu bar. A good website has menu bars that are easy to use and understand. They should be consistent between pages, contain keywords and users should be able to browse them without additional browser pluggins such as javascript or flash. Search engines must also be able to read your menu items. eBC developed the new website in a CMS that handles menus very well and as part of the template that is used on every page. The design incorporates eBC, Small Business BC and CMS technology.
  

  
  eBC Webpage Header/Menu
  
  
  
  eBC Webpage Footer/Static Links

• We deal with mainly three types of clients, those that are starting to get online, those that currently are online but need to grow and those that are not too sure but would like to read some case studies to see how other companies succeeded on the internet. With that knowledge in hand eBC created those three categories into starting points for first time visitors on the homepage. This makes it much easier for a first-time visitor to figure where he/she should start on the site and each section provides great information on where they should go next.
  
  

  
  Starting Points at eBC

• In addition to the categorized starting points, we have been trying to change the organization and flow of information on our website to make it easier for our clients to use. There is a huge amount of information available on e-bc.ca which we are working on presenting in a more sequential style. In this way we hope that the information is more accessible, less confusing and easier to navigate for users.
  
  
  
  Get Online Checklist
  
  

  eBC has many eBusiness related seminars with many returning clients so it was important that visitors can easily access the seminar listings and know what the upcoming seminars are so we made the Seminars & Events section on the right-side so our clients can know what's happening at eBC quickly.	Seminars and Events (Homepage Sidebar)
  eBC has a few different websites so it was important to integrate them into the main website, we did so by adding the "Featured Supplier" section which highlights one of our supplier's from the www.ebizpages.ca website.	Featured Suppliers (Homepage Sidebar)

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Web Analytics

• Server Logs - Server Logs can be used to track how many people visit your website and from where. They are usually very easy to use and may be set up with your hosting package. Server logs tell us information such as how much data has been downloaded from our website, how many visitors our site has had and where people have been referred from. Unfortunately, server logs do not deal with proxy servers very well and will often under represent the number of users who access your site from large networks.
  

  
  Server Logs Screenshot

• Google Analytics - Google Analytics is a free online tool that can track website usage. eBC has a Google account and uses Google Analytics to track how many people visit our website, where they come from geographically, which websites referred them, which pages are most popular, what links get clicked on the most and many other interesting statistics.
  

  
  Google Analytics Screenshot

• Crazy Egg - Crazy Egg is a great tool that you can set up to show how many people click on each link on your webpage. This type of tool is called a "site overlay" and can be very useful when trying to determine which areas of your website attract the most attention. This can be a free or a paid service, depending on the number of clicks on your links..
  
  
          
  CrazyEgg Clicks and Heatmap
  
  
• FeedBurner - FeedBurner is used to track the readership of eBizBlog.ca. Tracking the number of people who subscribe to your blog or other RSS feeds is often difficult to do. Server Logs can be very inaccurate with stats due to the number of web bots that browse feeds but don't correspond to an actual human user. FeedBurner does a very good job of estimating the number of subscribers to your feeds and can track other statistics if you sign up for a paid account.
  

  
  FeedBurner Screenshot

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Advanced eMarketing

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) 

• Text vs Images - Search engines cannot read images. If you look at the original eBC image, all of the individual boxes on the homepage were images of text and not text written in HTML. As far as a search engine like Google is concerned, this page is virtually blank and has no theme or associated keywords. We changed the website so that the information is written in HTML text and uses CSS for styling. This makes it easy for search engines to read and easy to maintain. The CSS allowed us to create the look and feel of the site the way we wanted it, while keeping the image count low for better SEO results..
• Keywords - Although the information on the eBC website was good, in order for search engines to properly index the pages we needed to rewrite the information with keywords and themes in mind. The first step was to think of the words that potential users would type into a search engine when looking for each of the pages on our website. The next step is to rewrite the content of the page to include the same information with around 7% of the words being the keywords for that page. Each page should only have 3 or 4 designated keywords in order to have a clear theme for each page. Making sure that the keywords are in the proper locations, such as title tags and headings is also important.
• Web Writing - People don't like to read long passages of information on a webpage; they prefer to scan small chunks of text. Once they find the information they are looking for they will want to be able to click on a link that leads to a more verbose description of the topic. Web writing incorporates providing scannable text for the user and the correct keyword content for search engines.
• Submission to Search Engines - Some search engines, such as Google, claim that they will eventually make their way to your website automatically, given enough time. Others, such as MSN, require you to submit your site to the search engine before they send their bot to index you pages. With that in mind, ALL of the major search engines provide the facilities to manually submit your website - and sometimes each page - to them manually, in order to speed up the process an make sure you aren't missed. Any time a major change is made to e-bc.ca or any of the other websites that eBC maintains, we re-submit them to the search engines to make sure that the updates are indexed properly.
• Sitemaps - Sitemaps are XML files that assist search engine bots in crawling and indexing your webpages. It provides a structure for your website and provides the date that each page was last updated. Having a sitemap is not mandatory, but it certainly seems to keep GoogleBot interested in your webpage, especially if you have a Google Webmaster Tools account and submit your sitemap to them manually.
  
  

  

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Interactive Tools

• Blogging & RSS
  
  • eBizBlog.ca - eBC has been running this blog since the fall of 2004. eBizBlog gives us the opportunity to provide information on a variety of topics, keep our clients up to date on the latest eBusiness news and get feedback in the form of comments from all of our readers. Our blog generates a significant amount of traffic to the eBC homepage, some of which would not have found eBC because the keywords they used to find the blog are not present on e-bc.ca.
    

    
    eBizBlog Screenshot

  • The application that we use to write and maintain eBizBlog - WordPress - has pluggins that we use to automatically generate RSS and Atom feeds that users can subscribe to using their favorite RSS reader. This allows our readers to stay informed of new articles without even having to go to our webpage.
    
    
    RSS Feed Icon

• Web 2.0
  • All of the changes that we have made to our website have resulted in better compliance with Web 2.0 standards. Having a website that follows these standards ensures it will be properly displayed in all of the latest browsers.
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Email Marketing

• eNewsletter - Email marketing is a touchy subject these days. A lot of companies engage in unethical practices when it comes to generating email lists. Spamming can ruin an organization's hard earned reputation very quickly. eBC does engage in a form of ethical email marketing. We provide our clients with the option to sign up for our monthly eNewsletter, both on the smallbizeducation.ca website and on the feedback forms for our seminars. Newsletters are only sent to people who have opted-in and given us their email address of their own free will. We clearly state what email addresses will be used for in our privacy policy and we do not give or sell that information to any other organizations. In addition, we clearly offer the option for our subscribers to opt-out of future eNewsletters at the bottom of each email.
  
  
  
  eNewsletter

Tools and Technologies

Open Source Software

• Website Baker - When eBC decided to overhaul the website, we decided that we needed a Content Management System for several reasons:
  

  Multiple people maintaining the website so there was a need for a consistent file system and management interface Frequent updates of the information on the website due to the changing nature of the internet We wanted a consistent style and user interface over all of the pages on our website

  Website Baker Admin Page

  After doing some research into several different open source content management systems we settled on Website Baker. Website Baker is not the most powerful CMS available, but it is widely used, has lots of support and pluggins and was perfect for eBC's website needs. We designed a template for all pages on the eBC website, which provided consistency and ease of use for our clients. The website is extremely easy to update and maintain on a daily basis.
• Word Press - eBC's blog, eBizBlog, maintained using Word Press. Word Press is an open source CMS that is specialized for blogs. There are so many users of Word Press that the library of available pluggins is amazing and you can find almost any functionality pre-programmed. Some of the features of Word Press that we really like are:

  ease of moderating and spam filtering of comments by users. automatic update of Google sitemap and pinging of Google (pluggin) a choice of several WYSIWYG editors for writing posts automatic archiving of posts by month and categorization of posts for easy browsing submission to Technocrati - a search engine for blogs

  WordPress Admin