Meeting Minutes

I gave my first presentation yesterday to the editor and publisher. I think it went well.

I had spent much of last week meeting people from different departments of the company umbrella and getting their perspectives on which areas the site should be developing. Of course, everyone who has an interest in the site has their own agenda; but there were a lot of interesting observations.

For instance, the site, at the moment, is top heavy. The modules at the top are big and bulky and overshadow the ones near the bottom. This is having an effect on newsletter sign-up, which is situated in a small blue box right at the foot of the page. Having spoken to one of the people who deal with this - the newsletter and the reader offers that are incorporated within it - on several of the company's sites, I learned that, when this module was transferred to the headline banner and reduced to a simple email-only registration, take-up increased significantly, and consequently, I would imagine, so did sales generated by the increased visibility of the integrated offers.

One thing that crops up repeatedly, is that people are not clear exactly what the USP is. Are users being encouraged to go there to book holidays/click on ads/enter competitions and then leave; or should they be invited to linger, research destinations and contribute content of their own.

We know we need to generate a lot more content. The scroll is short right now. When the new homepage goes live, the length will probably be doubled. There will be, I hope, more dynamic content and more content generated by the users - comments on travel issues perhaps, or advice on specific travel experiences.

We've even talked about the possibility of featuring a customizable area that would offer users a space where they could select their own favourite destination/currency convertor/weather-where-you-are etc.

I've been looking at the other newspaper travel sections and observing that they all get people in by putting more of their content on the homepage via thumbnails and brief text hyperlinks. We know we need to do this as, at the moment, too much content is hidden behind scrolling banks of images that people are not finding.

I'm now at the stage where I'm starting to construct wire frames and mock-ups of how the site might look in terms of layout and potential module scenarios.

After, that is, I get to grips with the complicated spreadsheets I'm being sent by all our partners. At least the ones that I produce are full of lovely colours!