mediaczar

On Friday 19 December 2008, we finally pressed the “Go” button on the new Porter Novelli site. It has taken us three months of planning and nearly six months of design, development and bug-fixing to get to this stage, so you’ll understand that we’re justifiably relieved and proud.

This is, I think, a great improvement on our old site. The old site was characterized by low information content, Flash front page, and the occasional shark. I’ve circled the shark in the following screengrab from our old site.

In order to keep all our various stakeholders involved at every stage of the project, we set up an “Under Construction” blog on TypePad, a Flickr set or two, and shared many of our planning docs on Scribd (you can see all of these on the blog.)

Because Porter Novelli is a global public relations network, we sent regular updates to the senior leadership around the world asking for feedback, case studies, and fact-checking. We couldn’t have done it without their help.

Our design and development partners were interactive design consultants Wilson Fletcher. I’d worked with Mark Wilson in the past life on a project for the Discovery Channel, and was impressed by his teams creative thinking and rigourous approach. One of the key objectives for the new site was to make something that would validate and be accessible to multiple audiences, and they’ve achieved that with grace and elegance!

My London team has also been invaluable: but particular mention should be made of Tim Hoang and Chris Nee who should both feel proud of their work. Tim, in particular, has been tireless in his bug-hunting and fixing; and without his various carefully-organized content schedules and relentless chasing-down of content-owners around the network we’d never have got this launched this year.

FAQs

What has changed?
What research did we do before we started?
Where’s the Careers section?
Who has been involved?
How can I send you comments or feedback?
What are we doing about search engine optimization?
I’m a geek. Tell me, really, what makes this so cool?

What has changed?

First of all, we’ve made the site easier for the user. The new site is designed less around what we want to tell people, and more about what they want to find out. Early tests show that users take less time to perform common tasks on the new site than they did on the old one.

We’ve also designed a site where our work and thought speaks for us, and has a much more prominent position than before. The new site highlights case studies — clicking on these draws the casual viewer into the site to see our services and our work.

We’ve also pushed a lot more information onto the front page of the site. And we link out much more to the rest of the web. You’ll see links to company blogs, and news stories in the trade and mainstream media

It’s important that we demonstrate the strength of our international network – so we’re pushing more international information to the front page.

There’s more space given to the individual offices. Each has its own page and we will soon be able to feed local news and job ads to those pages. There’s going to be an office finder on the front page, so it will be easy to get there, too!

Most importantly, there’s increased focus on the people who make up Porter Novelli. More people are featured across the site, there are more bios, and every case study has a contact who users can contact if they want to find out more.

You may be surprised to hear that there are already around 600 pages on the new site. For such a large site, it’s surprisingly easy to navigate — it takes only two or three clicks to get anywhere.

And there’s a very powerful content management system (CMS) behind the whole thing that makes it easy to change the content of any page, and to add new pages.

(We’re using the Drupal CMS for any Open Source fans out there.)

What research did we do before we started?

A great deal. Among other things we carried out a competitive website review which you can see (and share) at Scribd

I would really encourage you to read through this: you’ll note how the new site is not only better than the old site, but better than any of the competition. Hill & Knowlton launched their new site during our redesign period: we reviewed it on our production blog.

Where’s the Careers section?

The recruitment section is currently one of the most popular sections of the site. We’re working hard to make it even better, and it’ll be there soon (in release 1.5)

The new site will offer a much improved recruitment section which will include:

1. Career profiles (description of various roles in our offices),
2. Discover Porter Novelli (a description of what it’s like to work at Porter Novelli, and what makes us different),
3. Job search (a powerful engine that searches opportunities across our global network),
4. Job specification (detailed description of career opportunities),
5. Online applications (send your details and CV to the person responsible for HR in the specific office).

We’ll be offering HR teams training on this as soon as it is available, and before we release it.

The new section has a provisional launch date in January — which is when many people are likely to be looking for new jobs. The careers section had 8.4K views in Jan 2008, almost 2K more than the average month.

Who has been involved?

Well, we’ve asked lots of people for feedback: you can see some of it on our development blog which we’ve been keeping as a kind of diary of what we’ve been going through. Here you can see everything from our early pen-and-paper concept designs and technical wireframes through to the nitty-gritty detail work we’ve been doing for the past couple of months.

But really, the EC, Service & Growth Committee and worldwide Senior Leadership have been all been invited to feedback at critical times, and each Service leader has had a chance to sign-off on the copy and functionality. Every office has had a chance to check (and change) their details. And we’ve sneak previewed the site on a number of occasions to current staff, ex-employees on LinkedIn, Porter Novelli’s Facebook fans, and a bunch of people on Twitter.

Marian Salzman – our global CMO – has been truly helpful throughout the process; offering support wherever required.

And Jean Wyllie (who’ll probably kill me for putting this in) has been brilliant at putting up with my moments of “creative temperament” and giving me excellent advice.

How can I send you comments or feedback?

Please use the feedback system on the website. Again – we’ve created a button (clearly marked “feedback”) on the site that lets you do this, or simply visit

What are we doing about search engine optimization?

Currently 25% of our visitors never see the front page. They click on a search engine result (generally in Google) and jump straight to the page that they’re looking for. It is really important that they understand what we do on whichever page they may land.

Porter Novelli already places well for “international PR agency” on Google. Currently we’re #5 on Google for that search. We’re also #5 for “international public relations agency”, #9 for “international public relations”, and #14 for “international PR.” There’s strong competition for the “global” equivalents from other agencies, so we’re focusing on “international”. Also – don’t tell them this – but more people search for “international x” than “global x”.

We are currently in discussion about how we’ll change the site strap line in line with this information.

Because we’re changing all the pages around, we’re also putting a list of “redirects” in place. If someone clicks on a link to an old page that is no longer there on the new site, this list will automagically send them to the new page. This may not work perfectly, but our redirects list is 160 lines long and should cover off most of the old site.

We’re doing a lot of other best practice stuff like this; all a bit technical, and all very detailed and time-consuming. With any luck, this means that the site redesign will not affect our search engine rankings negatively in the short term, and will soon increase our positions.

I’m a geek. Tell me, really, what makes this so cool?

In special 10-things format:

1) Valid XHTML – the site works in any browser. We are the only major PR or advertising agency where this is true.

2) Accessible (WAI level 1) – complies with disabilities rights legislation in all countries. Again, only major PR pr agency where this is true.

3) Multiple content feeds in and out of the site.

4) We are the ONLY major marcomms agency website that works on an iPhone right now. Really.

5) No Flash (see points 1,2,4, above.)

6) Some deeply funky stuff happening with delicious.com that lets us create global, local, and personal clippings feeds from the same content stream.

7) Only DAS/Omnicom agency to include link to Privacy Policy & T&Cs. You think this stuff doesn’t matter? That it’s boring? That’s why you don’t get to build our website.

Human-guessable URLs that can be used as a User Interface as per Jesse James Garrett and Jakob Nielsen (In layman’s terms, you can read our URLs and know where you are in the site, and if wanted to, you could navigate through the site by adding to and chopping bits off the URL. You don’t want to do this? Fine. But it’s just great for our DDA/ADA compliance and for the search engines.)

9) Some session-based stuff going on so that the front page and the service section page are always in tune. Looks easy. Is funky.

10) All built on open source tools. Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) architecture, running Drupal as the CMS. This makes us very Web 2.0 (all the cool Web 2 kids are LAMP)

Why has it taken so long?

Who are you, my girlfriend?