Is it me? or has their website turned into a huge mishmash of different partially redesigned sections that have no visual connection to one another? From their homepage you can visit at least five different kinds of pages that, visually, look almost nothing like the home page.

Often you can click on links that take you to pages that have only a passing relevance to the text of the link. For example, “President Visits Horse Stables” would lead to the Washington Post Politics section which has a snazzy homepage that in no way looks like the Washington Post homepage or the rest of the site. And on this Politics homepage is where you find that the article you sought is half way down the page with a totally different title “Horses come out for President.” You click on the article and it takes you back to a template that resembles what you saw on the homepage.

It’s really a terrible experience for a site with such great content.

My brother works as a musician. He composes music for all sorts of things and, really, that’s where his need for a digital asset management system (DAMS) comes in. He’s got somewhere near 400 pieces of music and that number is only growing.

His clients, however, aren’t fond of searching a huge alphabetized list of content. They want to be able to search by tempo, by genre, by mood, et cetera. This is where WordPress can make itself useful. It already has an asset management system in it (at least in some respects).

Basically, every asset you enter into WP (image, song, video, whatever) is treated like a post — it gets an ID, a location, a description, and a title. So all that I needed to do was to add tagging to these assets, make those tags searchable by the front-end search, and build the front-end such that when someone landed on an asset that they could listen to it without having to download it.

This required a set of plug ins (asset tags, music players, and search enhancements) and then some modest front-end coding. But, suffice it to say, it was significantly easier than I thought it might be. Granted, the version that my brother is using would be much better with some obvious enhancements (e.g., making the audio player and download link appear in searches).

But it’s surprisingly easy for him to manage and definitely quite usable from a client perspective — that is, assuming that they know what they should be searching for.

Good news: it seems that Google Analytics has added a feature called “weighted sorts” to their ever increasing bag of tools they give us for free.

Why is this a good thing? There are probably lots of pages (in many cases, the majority), that aren’t in the top 100 — but, collectively, these pages may do a lot of work on the site.  This helps you compare those pages, in real terms to the pages that are staggeringly popular; it makes smaller data sets comparable to your pages that have many more visits.

This gives you the opportunity to, if nothing else, understand the value of your segments, pages, search terms, et cetera using similar numerical terms. Just as segments are the lens through which you should be examining your data, this is now an indispensable lens to have in your toolbox.

Either way, it’s not an exact science, but it’s better than what you have now, which is nothing.  And, because of how Google Analytics works, it’s not something that you could do yourself (because you don’t have access to every discrete visit which would allow you to weight them).

This is a really great post on the subject that gets into the meat and potatoes of it all. 

There is one issue with the post, however, in that it overemphasizes the value of $index re:weighted sorts.  Yes, it does show that certain pages on a user-per-user basis have a better $index.  Those pages, however, have such a significantly lower amount of traffic, that your next step is questionable; do you take learnings from the better $index page with lower traffic and try and translate them to the lower $index page with higher traffic?  Do you know what those learnings are?  Does the lower trafficked, high $index page perform better because it is very appealing to a small segment that is, by its nature, small?  How does that translate to the larger world of your site?

Anyway, it’s the perennial complaint with analytics which is “now that I see this data, what do I actually know? ” and then “what do I do with that knowledge?”  That’s where analysis and testing come in.  It’s the concert of data, analysis, and testing (and the iteration that you do with all three) that get you to knowledge that you can make actionable.

So, I’ve been working on this site for a client of mine for a while now — looking at stats, designs, user-flows and other ways to improve conversion and retention and just generally trying to enhance their online communications ecosystem.  Their work focuses on all sorts of issues, but mainly those related to democracy, rights, and transparency.

One of them, however, happens to be sex worker’s rights.  Occasionally, we’ll post something to the blog that covers that issue — always interesting and in depth.  What’s interesting (and surprising/not surprising) is that these posts are often quite popular.  They garner many hits a day from people searching for sex and a country or city that’s mentioned in the post.  Virtually no one, however, is searching for “sex worker’s rights.”

We’re thinking about ways to try and pull these people in to see if we can’t convert them into interested members of our audience, but I’m not keeping my fingers crossed on this one.   Without getting into too much detail, part of what’s interesting about this is that it also exposes a kind of weakness in Google’s search.  Without appropriate cross-linking, Google seems to freely associate everything on the page without much regard to contextual relevance.

So a post with a short segment about sex workers worldwide and a riot in Tashkent becomes, in Google’s eyes, a sex worker’s riot in Tashkent.  I guess they’re only SO good.