Analyzing the Nebraska Water Center Website Redesign

The Nebraska Water Center is an organization that focuses on helping the University of Nebraska become a leader in water research, teaching, and extension. The water center has maintained a website since the early 1990s. In 2015, I was tasked with redesigning and reorganizing the Nebraska Water Center website.

The new website was built on a newer Drupal-based platform, that promised easier web development and a mobile-friendly responsive website. As part of the website redesign an effort was made to improve the user experience on the website by presenting users with the information that they are looking for and removing unnecessary information.

In 2018, I compared Google Analytics information collected from 2014 when the old website was being used and with information from 2016 which was after the new website was up and working. Interesting enough, my initial findings were that the old website had more visitors than the new website.

However, a decrease in the number of visitors is not necessarily bad. All it clearly indicates is that there are less people coming to your website and indicates little about the user experience of the website. The decrease in traffic could be due to less promotion of the website on social media, especially considering how social media was rising in importance during this timeframe.

The bounce rate, which is users that visit the website and then leave right away dropped considerably. This means that visitors were finding content that they found interesting and browsing the website. I also found that the length of time that visitors were spending on the website increased by 26%. Overall, what the web metrics show is that while there are less people visiting the website, those visiting the website are spending more time browsing different pages.

The next steps would be to do some usability testing to determine how the website is being used. Specifically, an exit survey could be used to find why visitors are coming to this website. Search Engine Optimization could also be examined and used to help increase website traffic.