Blog: October 2007

Transforming Metamorphosis

October 30, 2007

MetamorphosisDon’t get me wrong—the USC Annenberg School for Communication’s Metamorphosis research project had a Web site. It was just pretty darn old (and infested with a bad case of pop-up frenzy) so when the team at Metamorphosis came to Hop Studios wanting a redesign, we were happy to oblige.

One of the “fun” challenges with academic sites is incorporating the school’s branding while creating a unique identity for the Web site. For Metamorphosis, this meant keeping some top bar branding and the USC logo, and then creating a site underneath it that had its own look and feel.

Metamorphosis has long been challenged to explain themselves quickly to Web site visitors, and we decided to approach the topic with an animated explanation of just what these researchers were up to. Visitors to the site can jump quickly to a topic of subject that interests them, or catch up with Metamorphosis with the What’s New blog.

Like so many research projects, Meta faculty have published a number of books, papers, and other pieces. We worked with them to create a common organizational system so that papers were sorted onto pages of the same topic, but also accessible by type of publication.

With the addition of some nice image maps of regions and research techniques, this site is a big step forward for anyone trying to grasp what Metamorphosis is up to.

On a special note, thanks to a motivated and organized Web site project leader on Metamorphosis’ side, this was one of our smoothest projects ever. If only they all came together so naturally!

Visit the new Metamorphosis Web site.

Posted by Susannah Gardner at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)

New York Times article on Web traffic

October 23, 2007

Site traffic: it’s something all our clients ask us about.

The New York Times just wrote an article about the difficulty of determining audience traffic numbers from outside an organization vs. that organization’s internal numbers.

How many people visited Style.com, the online home of Vogue and W magazines, last month? Was it 421,000, or, more optimistically, 497,000? Or was the real number more than three times higher, perhaps 1.8 million?

The answer—which may be any, or none, of the above—is a critical one for Condé Nast, which owns the site, and for companies like Ralph Lauren, which pay to advertise there. Condé Nast’s internal count “1.8 million” was much higher than the tally by ComScore “421,000” or Nielsen/NetRatings “497,000”, whose numbers are used to help set advertising rates, and the discrepancies have created a good deal of friction.

The If you’re too small to show up in Alexa or NetRatings, it’s even harder know if your numbers are accurate.

But we recommend Stat Counter, as an easy-to-use ballpark number that’s seemed accurate in our tests.

If you have questions about your site’s traffic numbers, let us know and we’ll be happy to explain them to you, or to set up ways to verify that your numbers are correct, whatever the source.

Posted by Travis Smith at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)

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