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Greater Atlanta
Unitarian
Universalist
Congregations
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Website – www.gauu.org - Sense of Face and Place
A new website was created for this project (www.gauu.org). We made a strong, concerted effort to create a “sense of face and place” with many photos and a simple metro-area map which gave a sense of where the 9 participating congregations were in relation to each other and metro Atlanta (all other Georgia congregations were listed below the map). The site was designed to be highly accessible for people with disabilities and was intended to be simple and straightforward, with few extraneous design elements. The purpose of the site – to provide clear information along with this sense of face and place – was kept in the forefront of the design effort. The site itself was intended to have little “personality” of its own, but rather to provide a clean, professional platform upon which to present our religion’s main ideas and the unique features of each congregation. An archive copy of the website will be maintained at www.gauu.org/archive for the foreseeable future.
Sense of "Face"
Thumbnail copies of 40 photos were randomly shown in a photo bar at the top of the website, varying from 4 to 12 thumbnail images at a time, depending on the screen width. The photos were contributed by 5 of the congregations, with additional photos from the area UU booth at Atlanta Pride Market.
Each of these images could be ‘clicked’ to show the enlarged photo and photo caption. Each photo had a link to that congregation's website in the photo caption. During the period of the campaign, 344 thumbnails were clicked to enlarge the photo and read the caption. This was NOT prompted – there were no instructions to click and enlarge – visitors did it intuitively and spontaneously.
The photos contained typical UU scenes: Religious Education (RE) classes, music performances, and, of course, potluck lunches! The only people identified in any of the photos were ministers and music directors.
Sense of "Place"
In addition to the photos that often showed the congregations’ facilities, the website had a line-drawing map of the Atlanta Area on the “Congregation” main page, with the approximate location of the congregations indicated by a small chalice along with the name of the congregation. The area around each congregation was a clickable link to the congregation’s page on the site. In addition, there was a menu entry for each congregation’s page and a “locator” that would show the approximate distance from an entered ZIP code to each congregation. In this distance chart, there were links to Yahoo! Maps where directions from the entered ZIP code to each congregation were a single click away. Every effort was made to make the process of finding each congregation as easy as possible.
The site also had a built-in calendar, where several events for the participating congregations were publicized, such as the book reading and discussion by Starr King President Rebecca Parker that was held at UUC Atlanta and "Hungry Ear" Coffee House that is held monthly at Northwest UUC.
Content on Website
Each congregation was given the opportunity to place content of its choosing on its page. The Radio Team eventually placed content on three of the congregation pages by extracting information from those congregations’ websites. The other six congregations were able to place content on their pages using the relatively simple online editing features.
Content for the welcome “Home” page and the “About” page was primarily drawn from the UUA's website (www.uua.org). The home page had the same random images of close-up head shots with apt quotations as found on the UUA.org website. The “About” page also had portraits of several famous UUs from the past, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Susan B. Anthony, with links to more biographical information.
Tracking the "Hits"
The website received 227 visits during the 12-week campaign, all of which appeared to be originated by the address being entered into the web browser (i.e. no links in from other sites or search engines). While some of the visits were return visits, examination of the website logs reveals that there were most likely well over 200 unique visitors, as only 3 or 4 visits were obvious repeat visits from the same internet connection. Since it is not possible to positively identify any website visitor, the exact number of people that viewed the site can never be accurately ascertained.
A total of 1,750 page-views occurred during these visits. On average, visitors viewed just under 8 pages, averaging almost 11 minutes per visit, spending, on average, almost 1.5 minutes per page. This represents an extremely interested audience, spending much more time per visit than is typical on other websites.
The map on the “Congregation” page was extremely effective, proving to be almost as popular as the text-links on the menu. It was common for visitors to look at the pages of more than one congregation. Visitors performed 48 ZIP code/locator look-ups on the website. There were also 51 visits to the maps/directions pages.
The website system had the ability to track the clicking of links that left the site, for example, to jump to a congregation’s website. While subsequent clicks on the congregation’s site could not be tracked, the initial jump from the gauu.org site to the external site was counted as a page view.
Most Frequented Webpages
Here is a summary of the most-frequented pages. Interestingly, the 40 photos that were rotated in the top-margin bar were clicked 344 times, and the "Home" page had 307 visits.
gauu.org
Webpages
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Number of
times visited
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Clicked on
congregation's
own website
(leaving gauu.org)
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Clicked on map
and/or directions
for specific
congregation
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| Home |
307 |
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| About |
58 |
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| Congregations (list of) |
157 |
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Emerson UUC
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44
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19
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4
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First Existentialist
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55
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13
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2
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GA Mountains
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24
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6
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3
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Northwest UUC
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37
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8
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11
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UUC of Atlanta
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81
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24
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7
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UUC of Gwinnett
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53
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10
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5
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UUC of Marietta
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26
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7
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3
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UU Metro Atl. N.
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74
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28
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11
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West GA UUF
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21
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5
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| Mid-South Dist. |
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1 |
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| UUA.org |
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29 |
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| "100 questions" page |
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22 |
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| Other sites |
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24 |
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| ZIP code lookups |
48 |
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| Photos viewed enlarged |
344 |
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| Feedback forms sent |
2 |
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| Calendar views |
35 |
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Reading the above chart, we see that 157 clicked on a list of congregations, then 24 clicked on GA Mountain's webpage, 3 clicked on map and/or directions to GA Mountain's congregation, and 6 visited GA Mountain's own webpage (thereby leaving www.gauu.org).
We see that seekers clicked 29 times on UUA.org, 22 times on "100 questions," and 24 on our "other sites" webpage – a total of 75 visits to webpages that offered general UUism information and research opportunities.
And finally, 48 visits to the zip code look-up webpage shows that people want to determine where UU congregations are located, relative to their home/work.
Technical Details
The website was set to prevent ‘well-behaved’ search engine ‘robots’ from scanning/indexing the pages. It does appear that there were four visits from robots during the 12-week campaign, but no hits from people entering from search engine or directory listings.
We set up an alias website as gauu.NET with identical content, except search engine robots were allowed to enter and index the contents of the site. Since this site was separate and had separate traffic logs, we could be fairly certain that the visitors to gauu.ORG were there in response to the radio announcements. We asked our congregational representatives to use the gauu.NET address if they needed to visit the site.
Having a short, catchy domain name of GAUU was essential to the effectiveness of the response to the ads. Since NPR, WABE 90.1FM, and most of the participating congregations use the .ORG ending to their domain names, it seemed natural to follow that convention. It is possible, but unlikely, that radio listeners entered the .NET address.
Observations
We do know that our ads prompted visits. Prior to the airing of the ads, all visitors were identifiable as either part of the Radio Team or congregational representatives. After the site was completely ready, and before the ads started, there were no unknown visitors. This is the advantage of having a brand-new website that cannot be found from search engines or via links from other sites. Within a minute of the airing of the first ad, we had a visitor that stayed for almost 9 minutes and viewed 9 pages. This was obviously a person who was listening to the radio while surfing the internet. Other visitors showed a delayed reaction, entering the site many hours after the most recent ad.
During the second week of November (11/11/02), when there were no ads being aired, website traffic dropped to a very low level, with only 4 visitors and 10 pages viewed during the entire week.
In evaluating visitor trends, there were more visits (130 of 227) during the hours of 6 am to 4 pm, even though fewer ads were aired (32 of 82). This resulted in a much higher visits-per-ad ratio (4.1 visits per ad in the daytime vs. 1.9 visits per ad in the evening). However, because of the much higher cost of the morning “drive-time” ads, the cost per visitor is not much lower than for the evening ads. From the traffic logs, it seems that many people heard the ads in the morning, perhaps during their morning commute, and then visited the website when they arrived at work. The evening commute did not show the same degree of response, although the evening programs did exhibit some level of immediate response.
Further tables and charts of the ads, visits, and time period analysis can be found in the appendix (Appendix E, Website Data). This entire report will be available online at www.gauu.org/report .
Conclusions
- PBS/NPR listeners will spend a long time (in internet terms!) reading the website, and they will take the time to click on photographs and map/locators. Give the visitor your congregation's "Sense of Face and Place". Also, give the visitor enough information to research your congregation and UUism on your website and beyond.
- Content is key – a complex, flashy site is not required to hold the visitor’s attention.
- The more expensive daytime advertisements did generate more traffic, but the additional traffic only barely offset the additional expense, as compared to the less expensive evening/nighttime ads.
- The number of visits dropped off over the course of the campaign, indicating that a point of diminishing returns might be reached fairly quickly.
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