Just In The Nick Of Time
Ofcom’s Recent Report Shows ‘The UK Is Now A Smartphone Society’ Three Weeks After Imperial War Museums (IWM) Launched A Responsive Site.
Last summer I was working on improving the page for the First World War Galleries at IWM London for the reopening of the museum, after a huge redevelopment.
We knew IWM was behind the times with our fixed width site. So we planned to transform the site template by template, starting with the exhibition pages. The plan was to establish agile working, work with stakeholders to identify priorities and make a responsive site at the same time.
It soon became clear that we were trying to do too much. We were asking our one and only developer, Baysaa, to develop, test and maintain two themes.
Armed with evidence from Baysaa I approached our former Head of Department, Simon. I put forward a plan: work on a project to make our site responsive but do it with a company versed in agile to help us establish it in our team.
Simon agreed. So, I set about making it happen as soon as the team returned from the Christmas holidays. We wrote the tender and sent it out to Drupal development companies. We settled on working with Cameron and Wilding.
Our aim was clear. Make our site work on any screen size, from mobiles to ipads to wide screen desktops.
As with all sites, IWM has many problems. With the responsive project we wanted to solve a big problem, that users couldn’t see it on smaller screens. The temptation was to try and solve lots of the other problems too. But we wanted to establish agile processes so instead we worked on a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Our MVP involved keeping the content and basic structure of our site the same. We wanted to be able to measure the impact of the responsive site on our average position in Google search results, click through rates from search and page load times.
Where we did change the functionality or content it was based on one of our department principles: evidence.
We launched the responsive site 15 July 2015. Just in the nick of time.
Ofcom’s research, published 6 August, states that phones are the most popular way to get online, overtaking laptops for the first time.
Google Analytics tells us that mobiles sessions on IWM’s site has increased by 51% YOY.
The Data
Since the launch of mobile friendly IWM we’ve seen some positive stats in Google Analytics.
Our average position in Google has increased by 63%.
Our average CTR has increased by 27%.
Our average page load time has improved by 17%.
The responsive site project was hard. But boy am I glad we did it.
The foundations are now laid to improve our site for both users and the business. We’ll tell you how it goes on our blog, Release Notes.
This is a quick note to say thank you to the whole IWM Digital Engagement team and of course, Cameron and Wilding. You were awesome!
