Youtube

Folks who build websites are relentless information trackers.  With a mantra of measure, measure, measure, they track and massage every detail of what they’ve built and how it’s performing.  We had measured the old Calliflower site, and found it wanting. So, last weekend Calliflower quietly launched an update of our web page. New look, new content, new menu system, new social media features, and so on.  Our goal was to make the content more connected to the social web, easier to find and understand, easier to read, and more relevant to our customers. 

• We replaced the prior custom built design based on Drupal, with a Thesis-driven WordPress design.  We’re not content management geeks, and Thesis with WordPress was simply easier to maintain, and search optimize for us.
• Our previous design was very colorful, with heavy use of orange and yellow.  The new design retains the color palette of the old design, but laid out upon a white background with large serif based type for easy readability.  It’s more traditional than the old design, and a lot more readable.  
• Information was hard to find on the old site.  This one adds a traditional drop-down menu bar, plus a series of short case studies on how you can use Calliflower in different circumstances. 
• Our customer base has grown, and the volume of questions we get about Calliflower has also increased.  So we replaced the previous creaky FAQ system with a new FAQ page built on John Godley’s excellent FAQ-Tastic plug-in, and augmented that with a forum built on the Simple-Press plug-in for WordPress.
• We’ve always been a believer in the power of blogs, but never had great support for them on our own site.  Now there are four new blogs for people who want to subscribe to Calliflower content: for Calliflower Conferencing Users, Calliflower Affiliate Partners, Press, and those who want to follow the Media Buzz about Calliflower. And, there are RSS feeds for each of those feeds, plus a single RSS feed for the entire site. 
• To augment our main site, we’ve built a YouTube channel as well, and a Facebook page for Calliflower fans.

Initial results look very good.  Page views per visitor have nearly tripled since last week, and our bounce rate on the site has dropped to a miniscule 5%, indicating that people are engaged by the content, finding what they want, and not just navigating away. We’ve literally doubled the number of people that stay on our site and stay engaged with our content, and that’s a great result.

So drop by, and check out the new Calliflower web conferencing presence.

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