Throughout the past year, BIT has maintained a customer-friendly, consistent and visual online brand by way of our website. Web modifications and updates continue on a regular basis, however, a complete and thorough review of the entire website recently involved staff input and was completed in late May.
The site content was streamlined and
updated and aesthetic design changes were made to the homepage to help improve
our website marketing grade report. Hubspot’s Marketing Grader is a free online
tool used to score a company’s website in which a full report is provided on
ways to improve the marketing, promotion and traffic of a website. The report
also had recommendations to improve BIT blog traffic and sharing.
Key improvements based on staff review and the marketing
grade report include:
- Increase
rich, customer service based language, fresh and inviting content; both on the
website and company blog. Update and review all content areas throughout the
website based on staff changes and recommendations.
- Increase
other agencies to link to our website or blog for updates and service
information when deemed appropriate.
- Continue
to review and monitor search engine optimization (SEO) throughout the site and
blog. The SEO of the BIT website is done very well, but there is always room
for improvement as content is updated and new information is added. The SEO on
the BIT blog is exceptional since Google is the leading force behind that
activity in which labels and keywords are included in every blog post.
- Feature
social media icons in the header rather than the footer throughout the site to
increase traffic and interaction to these social media sites. Also, bring the
“What’s New” section on the homepage to the top so users do not have to search
for the latest updates at the bottom of the page.
- Change
the location and design of the navigation on the homepage. Previously located
vertically on the left side of the scrolling image, they are now positioned
horizontally above the scrolling image. One key area of emphasis was to
decrease the amount of scrolling while maintaining consistency with design
structure and content flow.
- Add alt
tags to images on the homepage.
- Add an
email subscription and social media icons to company blog.
- Publish
more articles to the company blog and increase sharing component;
driving traffic to the blog and website.
- Ensure
the same quality and visual updates are carried through to the BIT mobile
website.
- Ensure content and navigational consistency between the Internet (public-facing site) and Intranet (internal to state government) sites.
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| Previous bit.sd.gov homepage. |
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| Current bit.sd.gov homepage with recent changes. |