Transforming insights into action: The City of Bryan’s website redesign journey

Chapter 1 — Introduction:

My name is Ken Smith. I’m the Web communications specialist for the City of Bryan, Texas. I’ve been in that role for just over… nearly 11 years.

I am in the communications and marketing department. But I also have to straddle the line and straddle the fence with the IT department, because we do all of our website design development production in-house for our main city website, our electric company website, the public library system…

I wear a lot of hats from designer, developer, user experience, data and analytics as well as content update and overall site management.

Chapter 2 — Website redesign:

One thing I would love to talk about also. We’re trying to do a redesign of our main city website every three years, and I know other companies and other analytics options are out there.

We have used Google Analytics for forever, and Google Analytics, especially now that you’re going to GA4, it’s not as easy to get very simple information that you want, just visitors, page views and clicks.

The Silktide Analytics was something that I was not expecting, was not even really in the market for, and it has been so helpful to me as quick hits for other users to see, to track, or other people in the city. So we can see, yes, your numbers are up. This is good. This is how many people came to your site. This is how many unique visitors. This is how many people— how many page views you had, and here’s how many people clicked on something. It’s the kind of thing that might take me half an hour or 45 minutes to rummage around and figure out in Google Analytics.

But probably the most helpful thing since we’ve been live has been the data maps: the click maps, the scroll maps, the frustration maps. Having that actual visual data is something that we’ve never had before when we actually approached a redesign. It’s extremely helpful as we’re meeting with all of these departments to be able to provide them with that data, something they can see, something they can hover over and truly say, okay, what is working, what is not. The rolling traffic that we’ve been seeing, you know, just the last 30 days.

We’ve been able— Starting with our— We started with our individual department meetings last August, and we’ve been able to go back. We had those department meetings. We made some small tweaks to our content structures and got the audits done and got new content on our current website. Then we’ve been able to go back and look compared from that first month compared to this past month, for example, and see, okay, are the content audits that we have made working?

Did the information provided by the click maps and the analytics and the scroll maps— did it work? And it’s been a resounding yes. It has given us the tools to make truly informed decisions, not just about what pages people are visiting, but how to structure those pages to give people the information that they are really looking for first and foremost.

And it’s also given us the ability to potentially restructure pieces of those pages for things that we want them to see first that were being buried. We actually have seen promotions of certain products and events since that happened skyrocket. So it’s been extremely, extremely helpful. Plus, it’s just a cool factor for a lot of people. People have actually been overly impressed with that data.

So there have been a lot of really interesting and good and productive decisions made based on this data that has been provided to us since we’ve had Silktide. I just can’t— I can’t speak highly enough about it.

Chapter 3 — Analytics and heatmaps:

It has been extremely helpful in what we’re doing for our— for the redesign to go through and to be able to have a specific heat map for every single page that we’re going through as we’re doing an audit of, you know, hundreds of pages and we’re giving this information to the departments. And probably the most helpful thing in terms of that, other than the things that we’ve discussed about having it on every single page, if you have someone in the last 30 days that hasn’t clicked on your page at all, do you need that page? So that’s actually kind of the lack of the clicks on the heat map has helped us on several pages. Just saying, okay, yeah, there’s nobody clicking on here. Question mark?

Having everything all in one place, it’s been a godsend for me because I’m in the actual meetings. They can switch back and forth, the click map, the scroll map. We can show all of this in one session. I can go and see, not only can you see the clicks, but then you have the URLs which were clicked to, the destination URLs. And I can show people, okay, you’ve had this many to this program, this many to this program, and then I can immediately toggle and say, and here’s where all that traffic initially came in to this page from.

But yes, having that all in one comprehensive suite has saved countless hours of time just of going back and forth between products. And it’s able to provide the shareable views. We use Airtable a lot for things, but having the shareable view to where we can share that particular map and all of that data with our other individuals who are not part of our, you know, my team or our core group.

They come around to the understanding that we have that is there are things that need to change and there are some things that are doing very well and are working, and that’s great. It also reinforces the good things that we’ve had. Since we’ve had Silktide last June and we’ve started making these types of changes, I would say we probably increased page interaction 10 to 15% just in, you know, the short amount of time that we’ve had it.

And we anticipate that that number will continue to grow as we continue to make improvements, we continue to make changes and use the data and see… Basically we’re using these things as almost as AB tests. We had a certain type of layout or certain things in certain positions at this point at the beginning of last year.

Now we’re going back after we get all these audits done to see, okay, what’s changed in these six months and is that going to continue to inform if we need to make changes? Did it get better or worse on certain products as we go into the redesign and start actually building out new pages where things go. Well, I can tell you that… I can’t even imagine how much time it has saved me just having data there to say— to make my argument for me, you know, try to explain something to someone who doesn’t get it to begin with and doesn’t understand to begin with.

I’d say, Here you go. Here’s how many people have touched or clicked everywhere on your page in the last 30 days. They’re like “Ohh!” and I said, look at what they’re not touching or clicking. Having the visual just cuts through all of the quote unquote red tape, you know.

Chapter 4 — ADA compliance:

I think there are some departments who have definitely seen it and have said, Oh this, like you say, yes, this has been helpful.

And yes, this, you know, helps us again, understand why it’s important. I would say those are the departments that already had an inkling that it was important to begin with.

One of the things that, and it’s not necessarily a heat map thing, but looking through all of the PDFs on our website and me being able to show lists of: here’s all the PDFs that we have on the website that are being scanned and we have to go and fix all of these.

I’m a member of NAGW, the National Association of Government Web Professionals. ADA Compliance is— for government web people —is so important and I’ve actually led a couple of sessions at conferences on ADA compliance. I talked to so many people who are using the big third party government website providers. I mean. They can guarantee that they will provide you with a website on day one that is perfectly compliant and on day one in the first hour, it’s non-compliant. The first thing that you change, you can break that.

So that to me is the reason that you need Silktide. You can trust people that yes, this widget is perfectly compliant and I can go in, I can scan it on that person’s website, and it’s like, yeah, no it’s not, according to this scanner, it’s not. What do you say? “Oh, we believe it is” Well, “you believe” doesn’t protect me from a lawsuit.

So I just, I really think that that’s the kind of thing that, you know, people can get is that peace of mind of knowing that you got a product that is built for this and that is, you know, to make sure that not only is everything legally compliant, but also that it’s being done in the best practice and it’s being done in a way that’s going to help usability for people who are both people with special needs or disabilities and people who don’t have special needs or disabilities. Good usability applies to everybody.

And that’s one of the things that I’ve been so pleased with with Silktide is because I feel like, you know, all of the pieces there of the products that I have at my disposal, they’re all aimed in one direction and that is good usability and making things easier. Make it easier for me to make it easier on the person visiting our website.

(Voice over) Contact us for a demo, today. With special thanks to Ken Smith from City of Brian, Texas.