You may have heard of the Digital Makeover from Simon Fairway already. It focuses on the South Yorkshire Funding Advice Bureau and hopes to examine and improve the use of technology and online collaboration/web 2.0 tools by the organization in a public way so we can all learn together. I've blogged about the Digital Makeover Project from Simon Fairway before (you can read those posts here and here) but want to give you an update on the first steps of the project.

South Yorkshire Funding Advice Bureau is a voluntary organisation and registered charity set up to help voluntary and community organisations get the resources they need and was selected as the featured organization in the Digital Makeover project because of the organization's openness to technology and change, and the capacity and culture to adopt new approaches. You can read more about the organization and the assessed overview here.

The first steps of the digital makeover, lead by Simon Fairway of Juvi Media and Danny Antrobus from SYFAB, have been to start a blog, a news website, and install Google Analytics. You can review Simon's posts to the Net Squared community about the Digital Makeover steps. Here are some of my reflections on these first major steps. What are yours?

Blog

Key Questions: How is the new blog going to affect website traffic and SIFT (SYFAB's interactive guide to fundraising)? What are the goals for the blog's affect on these two areas? How do you hope visitors will interact with the site and with each other?

The blog could do a great deal to increase and direct traffic to certain areas of the main website or SIFT by strategically navigating visitors. Finding as many opportunities as possible in link text back to the site/SIFT is an easy way to start. Looking for a blog post topic? Try highlighting something from the website that SYFAB thinks is important or useful but isn't getting much attention by visitors. Start a conversation on the blog about a topic the website provides information about or resources for and direct traffic there, too.

News Site

Key Questions: What are the goals and differences in purpose for the news site vs the blog? How can each be identified by visitors so that they can pick whether the blog or the news site is where they want to be? Why don't think link prominently to each other? How do you hope visitors will interact with the site and with each other?

Use the 'blog roll' area to highlight the website and blog as well as other online resources like SIFT. Identifying the goals and desired outcomes of use between the two blogs will help in creating the right branding and information for each as well as successfully separating them in the eyes of visitors.

Google Analytics

Key Questions: This is the fun stuff! Are you using Google Analytics (or the blog software's built-in analytics) for the website, blog, and news blog? You should be! Which pages or posts get the most visitors? Which get the most comments? Which do the most people find via a search engine? Which statistics are most useful to SYFAB in identifying whether the website/blog/news site is reaching its goals?

Per some of the findings that Simon mentioned...

'More than half of SYFAB’s visitors leave immediately after arriving at the home page.' This could be because there is too much information on the home page to quickly identify where to navigate or where to read. The home page of the SYFAB site is very lengthy. Often times, the best practice for home pages is to keep the home page 'above the fold' as much as possible—creating more of a launch page for information, rather than putting everything on the home page.

'The website gets more visitors based in London than Sheffield.' As an organization specifically supporting certain geographies, it's great to know where the visitors are really coming from. Putting in more geographic references on the site will help Google and other search engines direct visitors to the proper areas of the site. It would also be great to create some geographically related content on separate pages of the site so that visitors can be directed to information specially designed with their geography in mind, search engines can properly refer visitors, and SYFAB can build more community online. There are even wonderful ways to integrate online maps to these pages to show visitors where conferences or events are located (all on one map, quickly identifying ones in his or her neighborhood) or where offices and other resources are located.

'Most of the website traffic comes from direct referrals but around a third come via search engines.' Again, with so many people finding the website via a search engine (and keeping in mind how many people leave the site immediately), designing the home page to be clear and useful right away to a new visitor is key. Creating a launch pad rather than an information log, can help visitors quickly identify if the information they are after is on the site or not, without having to commit to reading a lot of information from the start.

Next Step

A quick next step that aligns with the above areas is to set up free Google Alerts about the organization name and industry. Creating alerts on 'SYFAB' and 'South Yorkshire Funding Advice Bureau' will let SYFAB staff know who is talking about the organization (whether it is resources, the website, the blog, the news site, or more) and where that conversation is taking place. Staff can then highlight these links or news stories on the blogs or check out the other site to add information to the conversation. It's also useful to create alerts about the services or industry, like 'funding advice' or 'fundraising in uk.' This will let you identify other blogs, news articles, or websites discussing the same topic, so SYFAB can get involved (whether by commenting on that site, linking to it, or blogging about it).

What experiences has your organization had using Google Analytics or Google Alerts? What advice do you have for SYFAB while it under goes this Digital Makeover?