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Speaker A Hi, my name is Chris Capel. I'm the designer and developer of the new globalro.org website, the new Go Society website. Ken asked me to make a short two to three minute video for you, just to summarize a few points about where we've been with the website and where we are now and how we got there and where we're going. The upshot is the site that you did have had a lot of good content but badly organized, difficult to use. Didn't have a content management system, lacked a lot of useful features that people have come to expect of quality websites in this day and age. And also was not the most aesthetically appealing site in the universe. Was a bit haphazard in its visual presentation. So Ken asked me to rate that site for the purposes of this video on a scale of one to ten. And I don't know if one is like the worst Imaginable website and then ten is like the best possible website. It wasn't incredibly bad, but I put it around close to a three. Let's say it was not ideal. It was quite far from ideal. What we have now, what we've managed to create since I came on board last year, is something completely different. It is a brand new site that remedies essentially all of the flaws and defects of the previous site and takes it to a different level entirely off the top of my head. The most important changes are the new site runs off a content management system called Joomla, which is an open source content management system. So it makes the site essentially just much easier to administer, much easier to run, and much more powerful. It's a platform that allows you to organize content, to organize and deliver content in a very efficient, streamlined manner. And so that's great. The site has a completely new design, a completely new look to it, which is a very significant improvement over the previous site. So it has a very streamlined, just much more attractive and aesthetically appealing look to it. So that's good. It's also got a much better navigation system. It's much clearer where everything is, so everything is better laid out, better organized. It's much easier to get to content. It's much easier to see what's there, what's available, and figure out where you want to go on the site. It has site wide search. You can type any terms that you're looking for into the search box on every page of the site, and it'll go through the entire site and deliver to you a listing of all the content on the site that meets your search terms. So that's a very large improvement. Profiles. Citizen affiliates can edit their own profiles now because we have a whole registration system that the old site didn't have. So now people can create their own accounts on the site. They can create user accounts, they can register to gain access to the site. If people are visiting the site and they're not registered users. They can sort of browse through summaries of all the content on the site, but they can't download any PDFs and they can't view any videos. So in order to do that, they have to register to create an account which is currently free, but which can be turned into something that can be charged for in the future. So that's good. The videos, we've changed the videos completely. We've converted all of the videos from Windows Media format to Flash video format, which essentially guarantees that everybody on the internet can watch these videos without any difficulty because everybody has the capacity to view flash videos. Everybody who can get online, who can browse the web can view flash videos. So we have that now. The videos are all in that format and also all the videos are actually hosted now on our own server, so we have complete control over all of them. So they're all being delivered from the same server that the website's on. That's great. So Ken asked me to rate this new site on a scale of one to ten. And I would say currently there's always room for improvement, of course, but I would say right now it's at about a seven and a half, like a solid seven and a half, getting up there towards an eight. There's a whole lot that we have planned to do with the site over the next few months. Many, many improvements that we want to roll out that will be gradually pushing it up towards eight, nine territory and then hopefully ten. Of course ten would be amongst the best in the world. That's what we're aiming for. In terms of statistics, we have not really been aggressively marketing this website. We've spent the last few months focusing on redesigning and redeveloping it, building it, getting it up, testing it, getting the beta out, getting user feedback, and just refining and refining and refining. We had the official launch at the end of January, but that's really the biggest push we've done. We just sent a mailing out to our mailing list, which has about just 3000 addresses on it, which isn't that's not like a huge push. So you'll have a report in front of you detailing the current statistics on the site, how many people are visiting and what they're doing and where they're coming from and so forth, and what the most popular pages on the site are the most popular content is. And you'll also have some goals in front of you for the next three months and methods that we're going to use to meet those goals, those traffic increase goals. And essentially we currently have just about 400 registered users on the site, which is I think is very good for the stage we're at. But in three months I think we can triple that. I think we can get about 1200 registered users on the site and I think we can quadruple at least the amount of traffic that we have coming to the site and also make people stay on the site longer and interact with it more. So in order to get there, essentially we just need to follow the plan that we've laid out. It's going to take a fair amount of work. I'm anticipating I'll need to put in 15 to 20 hours of work a month just on the marketing to get to that level, but I think it would be very much worth it. But even twelve to 15 hours a month would do wonders. And then finally Ken wants to know where should we expect to be in a year? Well, in a year the 2009 conference will have taken place and we'll have a whole bunch of new videos, amongst other things on the site. Getting in the process of being prepared to go up on the site. We'll also have been selling those videos on DVD. That's something else that we're going to be adding to the store. New feature, new idea, new concept. As a way to cover the costs of actually producing the videos, we're selling them on DVD. So that's going to be coming up in the next couple of months on the store. So throughout the year those videos will have been selling. By this time next year they'll be shipping and they'll be on the website. And also by this time next year we will have paid subscriptions on the site. People will be paying to access the site. Like right now people aren't paying right now. You register and it's free because that's just the way it is right now. So over the next few months we're going to be implementing a subscription system with a multi tier subscription options and the site is essentially going to become not just self sustaining, but also a source of revenue for the society as a whole. I think there are a lot of people out there who would be more than happy to pay for content of this quality because this is very high quality content and it's only going to get better, particularly the videos. Yes, there's the Robbliography, which is fantastic and I know everybody's looking forward to Ken Cradock's new version of it coming out. I'm sure that'll be very large traffic draw all the articles, the PDF documents, those are also very important, very useful. But I think the main draw on the site is now and will be the videos. Very important. We're also going to be turning those into podcasts. So that's a feature that we're going to be rolling out over the next few months. All the video content on the site will also be available just as audio files that you can download and burn to CD to play in your car or load onto your ipod or iPhone or whatever. And so that's coming up. What else? I think in a year, just the site is going to have a lot more content. It's going to look even better. It's going to have a lot more users, I think, in a year. I don't know. I mean, perhaps this is overly ambitious of me, but I would say that it's reasonable to anticipate that with a year of solid marketing efforts, you should expect to be able to have about 4000 registered users by this time next year. Now, as the question of 4000 paying users, I'm not sure we have to work out how we're going to implement the subscriptions and is there going to be a free level. There probably should be a free level, and then where you get access to minimal content and then paid levels beyond that. But definitely 4000 registered members by then, and then very substantial monthly traffic. I would like to see in a year, unique visitors per month, around the 25 to 30,000 range. I think that's very feasible. The bounce rate, I'd like to get down to about 20%. And I'd like the site to be coming up very prominently in Google and other search engines across all the major terms that it embodies. So essentially, in a year, the site will look better, work better, have more on it, have more people accessing it, and we'll be self financing. And that's the gist of it. It was a bit more than two or three minutes, but there you go. I have to get back to work now.