new website upgrade – things as is aren’t looking so good – part 1

Welcome to our site.  Like it?  Didn’t think so.  You probably came here expecting to find book content, information about us, information about our company “Watching Websites”, stuff about analytics in general or simply find cool anecdotes.

We put this site up as we were writing the book.  We found hosting (thanks Ian and Dan!), installed wordpress, installed the Atatahualpa theme and off we went.  We didn’t really have time to tend to the site too much for reasons that included hectic schedules, keeping up with the book deadlines and so on.

But now, the book Complete Web Monitoring is out!  Woot!

So, it’s time to give www.watchingwebsites.com some much needed love.  Over the upcoming weeks, we’ll be blogging about the process behind upgrading www.watchingwebsites.com, focusing on how we’re using analytics to figure out if things went well or not.  As always, we won’t be teasing you with how things could happen – instead, we chose to be transparent, name sources, show off tools, give out documents and generally try and give as much pertinent information as possible.

So, the following hyperlinks will get activated as soon as the articles go up (expect some of the titles to change!).  In the meantime, follow Alistair and I on Twitter for updates, or simply add us to your RSS reader (RSS feeds are mysteriously broken.  Still trying to figure out why!)

This is an article in a series of blog posts that will look at the process of building the new Watching Websites website, focusing on metrics & analytics.  The posts include:

Part 1: things as is aren’t looking so good
Part 2: goals?  what goals?
Part 3: baselining the existing site
Part 4: mocking up the new site
Part 5: marketing requirements documents (MRD) made easy
Part 6: requirements definitions documents (RDD) made easy
Part 7: analytics requirements documents (ARD) made easy
Part 8: choosing the right platform
Part 9: watching websites – the back end
Part 10: watching websites – the front end
Part 11: watching websites – going live!
Part 12: post-upgrade analytics in practice
Part 13: optimizing the site
Part 14: lessons learned & conclusions

Related posts:

1. new website upgrade – goals? what goals? – part 2