Results

Decreased website load speed by

64%

Page views increased in 1 month from launch by

50,000

People are now finding the information they want, much quicker and easier, in particular directly from Google. We can say this with confidence, because when comparing like-for-like monthly visitor numbers, we can see a huge increase in overall site traffic, alongside a fall in numbers of people entering the site from the homepage

Andrew Lawn, Support Specialist/Communications Officer, John Innes Centre

Improved design for better UX across devices

John Innes Centre was in need of a website refresh following a rebrand. They were keen to show off their great imagery, have a mobile-friendly website, lower bounce rate and increase quality job applicants.

Moving from Django to Wordpress, we’ve created a user-focused design and build. The site is now an attractive, fast, mobile-friendly place to discover science studies and apply to join the innovative company.

The previous iteration of the John Innes Centre website didn’t connect its publications to any other pages on the website. It allowed users to find the content they wanted, but didn’t send them anywhere else on their user journey.

We worked on the design of the news and events pages, giving the user more reason to move around the website. This has helped generate 50,000 more page views, increasing the pages per session from 2.79 to 3.12.

For faster browsing, we improved the website load speed from over 6 seconds, to 2.23 seconds.

Fast website search

The John Innes Centre publishes thousands of publications, has hundreds of contributors and people in their directory. All of which need to be easily uploaded into their CMS and searchable on their website.

We integrated their XML feed into Wordpress for fast uploading and publication syncing. The result? Reduced time required to publish content, improving efficiency. We also included automatic image resizing to further streamline the process.

For making internal search quick and easy we’ve integrated and customised Algolia. Algolia is a web search product which returns results almost instantaneously. This has proven to be a great addition to the site, helping users find the information they're looking for, first time.

A great feature that the John Innes Centre can use within Algolia is the ability to look over the searches made. This can then inform the content they publish on the website, to cover any content gaps.

Customer personas and content strategy for a more targeted approach

As part of the website redesign, we carried out a content audit. We worked closely with the team at John Inne Centre to determine the optimum structure, language and user journey. Doing so ensures that John Innes Centre are communicating in the most effective way with the user, while improving SEO.

Part the audit involved creating user personas to identify who is using the website and understand how best to engage with these target audiences. This approach formed content guidelines to ensure the correct language and terminology is used and that content was targeted to their audience.

We restructured the top-level pages to remove overly technical language, making navigation through to deeper pages much clearer. The deeper you get into the website, the more technical the content can become, appealing to scientists and students researching complex studies.

We used our minimum viable product approach (MVP) we to ensure a quick turnaround. This was achieved through using existing website copy to update the website while modifying top-level pages where necessary to make the user journey as easy as possible. Once live, we worked with John Innes Centre to optimise their web copy further.

Throughout, the management of the project has been very thorough and we have comfortably kept within the timeframes set beforehand. Liv and James have answered every question and request, even when contradictory with patience, while frequently suggesting alternative options when a suggestion has been impossible.

Andrew Lawn, Support Specialist/Communications Officer, John Innes Centre