« On the iPod/iPhone announcement | Main | You just KNOW Lenny Bruce is laughing his ass off at this »

Now, most of you know I'm getting married, and that my Fiancee is an artist and graphic designer. What you may not know is that she works for the Osceola County Library system in well, Osceola County FL. One of the big projects that she and one of her coworkers have been the primary people on is a redesign of the Library system's web site. That link I have to it is the new design.

A lot of times, people do redesigns because well, they think they should. But they are never quite sure what it will get them.

In the library's case, the benefits of the redesign are clear, and obvious. In the months prior to the rollout of the new design, average hit count was around 12,500 hits per month. (I forget page views or unique visitors) Not bad.

The first full month with the new design? Over ninety-five thousand hits. That's right. From 12,500 to over 95,000. With a significant percentage of users hanging out on the site for over five minutes. An almost-eightfold increase in hits, and longer loyalty numbers. That's what a good design got them. Will those numbers hold in the long run? Hard to say, but that's not a bad start.

Technorati Tags: Good Design

Comments

Nice design. Clean.

And those roll over picture menus are really nice.

Good design plays into how many hits you get as much as good content and SOE. Hard to keep people there with a sucky design.

Posted by: Tom Thompson | September 6, 2007 9:25 AM

Actually, our final page hit count for August was 105,502. :)

Unique visitors: 30,000+ (of which about 13,000 were new to the site, and about 17,000 were returning)

While about 18.7% of our visitors stayed on for more than 5 minutes, of those, 6.8% stayed for longer than 20 minutes, and 3.4% stayed over an hour.

Posted by: Melissa | September 6, 2007 4:11 PM

Meanwhile the King County Library System here in Washington (lest you think we're rubes, it's the fifth largest system in the country) just redesigned their front page. http://kcls.org/ It's much PRETTIER, I'll give them that, but they said their main goal was to "make things easier to find." To that end, they have everything scattered at random all over the page that used to be in a single column on the left. Some of the principles of web design really go over my head, I have to admit.

Posted by: Arvid | September 8, 2007 6:57 PM

Very, very slick rollovers. I will send to Huntsville Library.

So when is your big date, so I can send you guys the Amazon card or similar?

Posted by: Suman Chakrabarti | September 12, 2007 5:08 PM