New look to Electric Scotland

[Alastair]

Just wanted to tell you that I've just had an email in from Ezoic telling me they have almost completed testing and they now plan to go live with our site at 8 am PST on Monday.

That means you should see a new look to the Electric Scotland site on whatever platform you are using be it smartphone, tablet or desktop. I'm told when I get up on Monday morning EST that I should have some screen shots in my email folder showing the new look. They were going to go live on Sunday but decided to postpone it to Monday so they will be around to fix any issues that might come up.

So fingers crossed that things will go well.

To remind you on what is happening the basic site will stay just as it is but any time a visitor goes to any page on our site they will be re-directed to Ezoic so that the page can be presented using the Ezoic templates. They will auto detect where you are using a smartphone, tablet or desktop to access the site and use an appropriate template for that hardware device to present the page to you.

The Google adverts will be changed to what works best for the device you are using so on a smartphone you might get a text advert rather than a display advert as an example. We are told that some 30% of visitors are coming to the site using either a smartphone or tablet and these numbers are growing and hence the main reason for trying out this service.

As Ezoic use the cloud they have unlimited bandwidth to serve up the pages so you should also see some speed increases as well. The overall aim is to give visitors a better experience when visiting our site and thus increase visitor numbers and advertising revenue.

So it will be interesting to see if all they promised will play out in real life.

As our current menu is large they want to deliver a better menu and so I had to send them a 5 item menu giving a drop down to other sub menus. I'm not sure how this is going to work but here is the menu system I proposed...

1. Home www.electricscotland.com
2. ES Web Sites & Services
ElectricScotland.net www.ElectricScotland.net
ElectricCanadian www.ElectricCanadian.com
Electric Scotland Forums www.Electric Scotland.org
Beth's Family Tree www.electricscotland.com/bnft/index.htm
Help www.electricscotland.org/help/
Terms & Conditions www.electricscotland.com/ester.htm
Contacts Us www.electricscotland.com/contact.htm
Services www.electricscotland.com/services/index.htm
Videos www.electricscotland.com/music/videos/index.htm
Scotland's Future www.electricscotland.com/independence/index.htm
Flag in the Wind www.scotsindependent.org
What's New www.electricscotland.com/whatsnew.htm
3. Kids
Children's Stories http://www.electricscotland.com/kids...ns_stories.htm
Games www.electricscotland.com/games
Kids www.electricscotland.com/kids/index.htm
4. History
Agriculture www.electricscotland.com/nature/index.htm
Articles http://www.electricscotland.com/hist...cles/index.htm
Books www.electricscotland.com/books/index.htm
Business www.electricscotland.com/business/index.htm
Clans & Families www.electricscotland.com/webclans/index.html
Culture www.electricscotland.com/culture/
Famous Scots http://www.electricscotland.com/hist...cant_scots.htm
Gazatteer http://www.electricscotland.com/hist...teer/index.htm
Genealogy www.electricscotland.com/webclans/scotroot.htm
Historic Places www.electricscotland.com/historic/index.html
History www.electricscotland.com/history/index.htm
Beth's Family Tree www.electricscotland.com/bnft/index.htm
Scots Irish http://www.electricscotland.com/hist...tsirishndx.htm
Scots Regiments www.electricscotland.com/history/scotreg
5. Culture
Culture www.electricscotland.com/culture/
Donna's Page www.electricscotland.com/history/america/donna
John's Page www.electricscotland.com/poetry/henderson/
Food & Drink www.electricscotland.com/food/index.htm
Humour www.electricscotland.com/humour/index.htm
Lifestyle www.electricscotland.com/lifestyle/index.htm
Music www.electricscotland.com/music/index.htm
Pictures http://www.electricscotland.com/trav...ures_tours.htm
Poetry www.electricscotland.com/poetry/index.htm
Postcards www.electricscotland.com/cards
Religion www.electricscotland.com/bible/index.htm
Robert Burns www.electricscotland.com/burns/index.html
Services www.electricscotland.com/services/index.htm
Shopping www.electricscotland.com/shopmall.htm
Songs http://www.electricscotland.com/poet...son/singalong/
Sport www.electricscotland.com/history/sport/
Tartans www.electricscotland.com/tartans/index.htm
Travel www.electricscotland.com/travel/index.htm
Trivia www.electricscotland.com/scottish_trivia.htm

So this will show you where everything is under the new menu scheme.

Obviously once the new pages start to be served up I'd be keen to know what you think of the new presentation. I will also provide a report once we're a week or so into this to let you know if we are seeing any improvement.

Alastair

[Rick]

Re: New look to Electric Scotland

Super handy menu Alastair! It reminds me how much material we have access to. Thanks big time!

[albalad]

Re: New look to Electric Scotland

Alastair, I think the new menu bar looks very smart - I've just been trying it out and everything works well except that the sub-menus take longer to load. (This could be due to my own system, which needs upgrading as I'm still running XP.)
I notice, however, that if you click on ElectricScotland.net the old familiar blue menu bar comes straight up and works just fine for us old stick-in-the-muds, so it's not really such a huge difference.
Overall, thumbs up - great job.

[Ranald]

Re: New look to Electric Scotland

Alastair, first impression not good, as my old brain takes time to adjust to change

However the clue from John, lets me 'go back to the old days' which give me a second chance.

I also noticed, that it was a little slower, than the prior times.

Ranald

[Alastair]

Re: New look to Electric Scotland

This new system is only on es.com so es.net is not affected unless we add it in at some future date.

They are trying out various templates so we need to grit our teeth for at least a week to see how it all pans out. I also agree that it's slower. They will cache the pages over time so it should get quicker.

I tried the smartphone out and the display is much better on that device. As I don't have a tablet can't comment on that display.

According to our site analytics people access the site...

desktop 63%
mobile 22%
tablet 15%

So you can see why we're concerned about giving a better experience to non desktop users.

I wasn't that keen on the pages I saw displayed as I felt the Baronial Home graphic which nice took the content far too far down the page so we've removed that as an option.

The other templates used also in my opinion take the content too far down the page and they really should tighten that up more as there is too much blank space.

That said I'm pleased you are generally positive on the new display.

As I understand it only 10% of people are seeing the new templates at this time and as they get better stats this will increase.

Alastair

[Alastair]

Re: New look to Electric Scotland

I might add that our demographics have changed somewhat over the past couple of years. For example some 60% of our visitors are now under 35 years of age whereas most were over 35 years of age.

Likewise we used to have more female visitors than male visitors and now 54% of our visitors are male.

Alastair

[Alastair]

Re: New look to Electric Scotland

I might add that I can make some changes to the menu so for example I could add another main menu link if that would help any. I found it quite difficult to decide on how to do this menu and decide on what to put under what. I am thus moire than happy to consider any changes that you think would be worth while.

I also noted that I seem to have messed up somehow by replacing the main history index page with essentially a blank page. Not sure when this happened but have asked Steve to check up on our backups to see if we can restore the old page or if not will need to re-create it. He's in the middle of moosefest at the moment.. he's in charge of getting it all setup and is the general manager for the event so into security, layout, sound and communications, etc. so it will be next week before he can get to this.

Alastair

[Alastair]

Re: New look to Electric Scotland

Steve is now back from his festival duties so hopefully we can now restore the old History page in the next day or so.

We are also experiencing some issues which we're exploring resolutions for. The site does seem slower than it was so speed is an issue. We have also discovered that some pages are not loading which needs to be fixed. And we've also found they have decided to split up some of our pages into sections so if we have a page such as Robert Burns Lives! they have stopped at Chapter 29 and offered links 1 to 8 for you to read the rest. We don't like this method so are trying to ensure they don't do that.

We're also finding that some people are reporting problems in downloading pdf files. There is certainly a speed issue so it might just be they are taking way longer to download but we need to clarify it's a speed issue rather than another issue. Of course if it is a speed issue that also needs to be addressed.

Now we have been in operation for a full week we're getting a better handle on things but we'll really need a full 4 weeks of testing to get a more accurate view of things. With the stats we have to date it seems that about 40% of our visitors are using mobile or tablets to access the site. That is somewhat higher than we'd thought.

Our bounce rate is being measured in a different fashion to how Google analyses things. Google decided that anyone visiting just one page and leaves the site then that is recorded as a bounce, It seems more and more people see that as a flawed approach and so the new approach is if they leave the page in under 30 seconds that is recorded as a bounce, However if they stay for longer than that they believe the person is actually reading the page and is thus engaged and it should not be recorded as a bounce, This also affects the time people stay on the site as again with Google recording a bounce if you just visit one page they don't record the time spent on site.

So let's say someone visits just one page but spends 8 minutes reading that page then Google will record that as a bounce and hence 0 time spent on site. The new method doesn't record that as a bounce and also recognises they spent 8 minutes on the site. You can thus see how much of a difference that can make to site stats.

What that means to us is that a recorded bounce rate of 78.5% and average session duration of 1:32 with Google now reduces our bounce rate to 27% and increases our average session duration to 4:17 and so quite a large difference.

I do have a smart phone and so able to view the site with that and I do think it presents the site in a better fashion so that'a a plus. I personally don't like the way it is displaying the desktop version and would like to improve that if possible. It would seem that most like the new menu system and so it would be possible for us to develop that same system on our old display should we decide to go back to it. I have not yet had any feedback from people using a tablet and don't personally know of anyone using that device so if you have one you might let me know what you think.

So that's my progress report to date and again do feel free to give me any updates of your own dealings with the site.

Alastair