I'm James Stevens, web manager at the RSC, and I'd like to talk you through the new homepage we launched for public use and feedback last night.
Over the last year the RSC has been intently listening to visitors of our websites. We've studied the traffic through popular pages and pondered why buttons haven't been noticed, noted when navigational devices haven't taken them to the places they were expecting and have even lost them completely.
As you might expect we've built up a long list of improvements that we could make and quickly realised that if we tried to fix everything in one go it would take a very long time. As such, in order to improve things immediately, we have prioritised changes based on volume of feedback and started to make them.
Over the last three months you may have noticed differences to our 404 'page not found' messages that have helped more people find what they were looking for. We've tweaked our search pages so that searchers know that they can refine their searches by website area and now the latest change we've made is to the most commonly used starting point to navigate the site - the homepage.
The page design is best explained in sections:
The Header
The new header has been created to allow visitors to easily navigate and give visibility to the most used websites of the RSC (the publishing platform, the free chemical database and our online community) and, via additional options under "More", to other important areas visitors need to find. Over the next couple of months you should start to see it appearing on the other sites you visit.
The New Tabbed Navigation System
In an online survey on our "Page Not Found" error page, 20% of 239 respondents gave navigation as a key area of our website that they would like to see improved.
The links in the navigation bar have been carefully chosen to reflect current usage and demand for content. We have purposely steered away from a departmental structure as your feedback has shown it wasn't helping you find what you wanted.
The navigation bar will initially just be displayed on our homepage but we will be rolling it out to the whole corporate site in the next phase of work. This will mean that no matter where you are you should be able to navigate to the important sections easily.
The Carousel and Join Section
The image carousel has been created as a way to showcase the myriad of work that the RSC is doing to advance the chemical sciences. It recognises that our important campaigns, events and journals sometimes need a little help being discovered by visitors on a typical journey to their favoured area. Take a moment to have a look at what we're doing right now! http://www.rsc.org
The join section has been created to make sure all our visitors remember that we are a membership organisation and by
joining the RSC you can help us with our work while benefiting from our member subsidies, library services, networking opportunities and career advice.
The Top Tasks
Ask yourself what was the last thing you opened up your internet browser to do? Was it to find out more about diamonds? I just got engaged! :) Perhaps you wanted to see whether your friends had replied to your post on facebook or maybe it was to find the location of the conference you're about to attend. Whatever it might have been I can almost guarantee you had a specific task in mind. This area recognises that fact and has been structured to help you get to what you are looking for efficiently and easily.
The Footer
The footer is similar to the header of the page in that it will begin to be standardised across all of the RSC websites. The footer has a single privacy policy in recognition of the importance of your data protection and now across all of our sites you can be safe in the knowledge we will treat your submissions with respect and secure them to the best of our abilities.
The footer will also allow new visitors to quickly find out about the Royal Society of Chemistry (About Us), what our vacancies are (Working for the RSC), what our position statements are and how to contact us about a story (Press Office).
Tell us what you think
As I explained earlier we have already gratefully received lots of your feedback and this blog is an opportunity to continue to help us to help you.
We are very keen to hear your thoughts so post a comment under this blog, tell us what you think on Twitter using the #rschomepage hashtag, or message me privately via myRSC.
In the coming weeks we’ll be rounding up key improvements and website changes on this blog so watch this space.
We’ve started on the road of progressive improvements at the RSC and the new homepage represents a real step change – we’ve rebuilt it to deliver an intuitive and user friendly experience so visitors can better explore the wealth of RSC content on the web.
