3 ideas for making your home page better

Web-news experts downplay the role of the home page in a news ecosystem where social-media referrals are so important, but analytics show lots of theorion.com readers start with the home page and navigate to stories from there.

So, I took a look at the current page and came up with three suggestions to make it more useful and appealing.

1. Standardize photo size and make the play image horizontal

Wordpress templates don't adjust themselves to get rid of unnecessary white space, which means the home page can look messy if photos aren't cropped with an eye toward making the space around them work well. Solutions:
- In the carousel or rotator that is the dominant art element at the top of the page, make sure the photos are all horizontal and that they're cropped to the same size. If you don't, the whole page will jump up and down as the template adjusts to each new photo depth.
- For all stories teased on the home page, make the photos horizontal. If you don't, the coding will create chunks of trapped white space. To the right is an example of how a vertical and a horizontal photo at the top of two sections affect the space. The vertical photo creates an empty space.

2. Replace the sidebar calendar with a list and move it to the top of the sidebar

Now that The Orion has a calendar editor, have that person pick three things of interest that are happening on campus or in the community each day and put them in a module at the top of the right column. 

The list could be titled "What's Happening Today" or something like it and be taken from events that are already in the calendar. It should be changed every day, adding one more fresh element to the home page and training readers to come back to The Orion every morning. Topping it with a small photo would make it more appealing.

You should end the list with an invitation to see what's on the rest of the online calendar page. 

3. Use the template better by emphasizing photojournalism

When the editors chose the FLEX Wordpress theme, I'm sure they liked the bold look of having a photo carousel stretch the width of the page. That's great, but it doesn't play to the strength of The Orion, which at the moment is hard news coverage. I was going to suggest that the paper look at a different template that plays to strengths instead of a weakness (see The New York Times homepage for a template that focuses on news), but a better idea would be to improve your photos. 

Having a photo of the day consistently is a good first step, but in the web world it's essential to have good great visuals to attract readers. There are talented shooters on the staff this semester, so that should be easier than it has been in the past. But good editing is essential:
- Only include stories with great art in the carousel.
- Be sure the images are sharp and have enough resolution so they aren't pixelated or fuzzy in a large size.
- Be ruthless with crops. You want stunning images that are composed well as your invitation to readers.
- No more signs or logos in the carousel! 

January traffic shows importance of social media

Traffic for thorion.com January 2017 and January 2018 (click to see a larger image)

The beginning of a semester is typically a slow time for traffic at theorion.com, so the low numbers for the past two weeks aren't a surprise. A close look at the Google analytics does provide an insight into how important social media is to a the website.

I set up a traffic comparison between January 2017 and last January 2018. That's the graph at the top of this post.

Why the difference? Well, the flow of news is different from day to day and week to week, but my impression is that this semester started out really well on the news side. I thought that would show up in the traffic numbers. Also, news reporters and editors had tweeted up a storm as they covered a women's march and two political events, so I expected a bigger audience.

What I found when I dug deeper into the analytics was the opposite. And while there are other factors at work, I think I also found the reason for the slower traffic.

Social media acquisition comparison, January 2017-January 2018 (click to see a larger image)

Traffic driven by the tweets was responsible for driving more readers to theorion.com last month (a 158 percent increase), but a poor effort on Facebook more than matched it and was responsible for 76 percent decline in Facebook referrals -- that's more than 1,100 fewer visitors! Referrals from Google search and visits from people who typed in "theorion.com," were about the same in the two months, so this turned out to be an almost perfect experiment in the importance of social media.

Mobile app downloads and traffic for January 2018 (click to see a larger image)

The numbers for The Orion's mobile app were comparable. One bit of good news: Downloads made a big jump during the first week of classes. I'm going to guess that's because staff members at the first critique of the semester added the app to their smartphones.

Here are the most-read stories from the first two weeks of the semester. Note that eight of the 10 were written by reporters or editors from the two news sections.

1. Chico State sisters die in fatal car crash - 445 pageviews
2. Gas tax proposal endorsed by local representatives fuels unrest in Chico - 408
3. Commercial cannabis legal in California yet still banned in Chico - 211
4. Memorial planned for Frace sisters - 207
5. Michael Bethea: a journey - 201
6. LaMalfa speaks against gas tax, attacks protesters - 157
7. Congressional candidates speak out at town hall - 145
8. Domestic dispute leads to lockdown of two local schools - 121
9. Wildcat of the Week - Claire Wayne - 119
10. New director of Gateway Science Museum - 118

Here are the basic traffic numbers for Jan. 21-Feb. 1.

From Google Analytics. Click to see a larger image

A few words about video framing

It was great to see so much multimedia in The Orion reports this first week of the semester! News did a great job of documenting the women's march on Saturday, and sports decided to make Wildcat of the Week more than just a print feature by producing a video of the regular Q&A.

I did notice a big difference in the way the news reporter (Kendall George) placed her interview subjects in the video frame and how the sports reporter framed softball player Claire Wayne. See if you can spot it.

Did you see how Kendall put her subject to one side of the frame and how the woman almost fills the frame from top to bottom? While both shots show the viewer information in the background to help tell the story, the sports shot has more background than it needs.

Most cameras will let the videographer turn on a feature called "rule of thirds" to help with this positioning. Here's how Kendall's shot looks with the thirds highlighted. She positions the woman's at a place where the lines cross.

Filling the frame the way Kendall did is even more important for readers who are watching video on their phones because the screen is so much smaller.

Kendall also did a good job of using a microphone for her interviews (you can see the lavalier mic clipped to the woman's top). This really helps limit background noise and produces clearer, cleaner interview sound.

In another interview, though, she did one thing I don't recommend.

Framing is pretty good here. If you watch the video, though, you'll hear that the sound is distorted because the woman has the mic in her hand and is talking directly into it. This type of mic isn't built for that use, and the mic in her face is distracting. Make interview subjects wear the mic, not hold it.

After a strong start, web traffic fizzles

Fall Semester 2017 Web Traffic from Google Analytics.

Traffic on theorion.com slowed way down in the last half of this semester but still managed to outpace Fall 2016 by 24,000 page views. Last spring semester, though, was three times as busy (678,035 pageviews) as either one.

The numbers did contain one bit of good news, though. The bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who stayed to read just one page) was the best it's been in three semesters: 25 percent. Fall 2016 was 66 percent; Spring 2017 was 36 percent.

Fall 2917 mobile app analytics from GoodBarber.

Traffic on The Orion mobile app was also down from spring -- 15,691 views versus 23,787 last fall --  but downloads crossed the 2,000 threshold as 142 people put it on their phones.

 In all, it was a pretty dismal showing after a strong start.

I think my diagnosis of the problem from earlier in the semester is still valid: A poor social media effort kept the number of visits and views low. That's something that HAS to be addressed next semester.

Silver lining: The Orion home page continues of get strong and consistent traffic: 31,324 visits this semester and 32,266 during Fall 2016. That means visitors are using theorion.com much as they use a regular newspaper to browse what's new and important on campus. That same behavior shows up for section fronts, too. Here are the pages with the most traffic on the site from Aug. 21 to Dec. 15.

Fall 2017 Orion Awards

The Orion staff got together at Selvester's Cafe on campus Wednesday night to celebrate the end of the semester and recognize exceptional work by their peers.

Here are the award-winners for Fall 2017:
Sports: Noah Enns
Opinon: Kendall George
Arts & Entertainment: Caitlyn Young
Breaking News: Natalie Hanson
Enterprise News: Alex Grant
Copy Editing: Josh Staton
Design: Connor Gehrke
PR: Andrea Gonzalez
Best Editor: Julia Maldonado

Sunshine Award: Christian Solis
Rookie of the Year: Alex Grant
The Orion Award: Justin Couchot

Congratulations everyone!

Ed board for spring semester named

Julia Maldonado

Incoming Editor-in-Chief Kayla Fitzgerald has announced her  Orion editorial board hires for spring semester 2018.

Julia Maldonado, a junior Journalism and Public Relations major, is the new managing editor. She has worked two semesters at the newspaper as an arts and entertainment writer and editor of the arts and entertainment section.

Here are the other editors named this week:

Art Director - Connor Gehrke
Chief Copy Editor- Piper Loring
Assistant Copy Chief - Ruby Larson
Breaking News- Natalie Hanson
Enterprise News - Alex Grant
Arts and Entertainment - Nicole Henson
Opinion- Jackie Morales
Sports - Justin Couchot
Multimedia Editor - Caitlyn Young
Calendar Editor - Kendall George
Web Editor - Amar Rama

Congratulations and best of luck in your new positions!

November traffic takes a serious dip

Chart from Google Analytics

Pageviews on theorion.com were down significantly in November -- about a quarter of the traffic from the month before and half the pageviews of November 2016.

A dip from October is expected. Students and most faculty aren't on campus for a week. Still, compared to the same month a year before, these numbers are dismal.

As I mentioned last month, social media and especially Facebook are becoming more and more important as a way to attract readers to the website. In November, only 13 items were posted to The Orion's Facebook page. Here's what Google Analytics had to say about how that affected traffic:

That's means just 11.3 percent of site visitors got to the website from a Facebook post. Here's what the social media numbers looked like the same month a year ago. (Click to see a larger image.)

So, while visits (sessions) were down almost 30 percent, social media referrals were down 61 percent. Because the number of visitors who stick around and view more pages after they get to a page on theorion.com is traditionally pretty high, that spelled double trouble for pageviews.

Twitter isn't a big traffic driver for the website, but numbers there were down, too. Here's a scary chart from Twitter analytics. The down arrows show a comparison to the month before.

The silver lining in these numbers is that the number of Twitter followers is way up. So, the breaking news and sports teams' efforts to live tweet seem to be paying off, but failing to Tweet links to stories drove Twitter-supplied traffic way down. If reporters and editors start tweeting about stories when they're published, those numbers and overall visits will improve.

I don't want to ignore the overall picture, though. There are reasons sessions were down significantly besides the poor social media effort. Overall, the website took a big step back.

One reason I've pointed out in the past couple of weekly critiques is editors circumventing the automatic publishing function of Camayak so stories don't instantly appear on the website when they've been edited. Instead, editors focused on the print edition are putting them in the paper first and only later uploading them to the web (or not uploading them at all). With the majority of the target audience reading The Orion online, that's a losing strategy.

Another reasonable explanation is that content wasn't as compelling. It's important to understand that a lot of visitors still use theorion.com like a newspaper. They visit the home page and then section pages to browse headlines. That's usually reflected in an amazingly low bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who read a single story and leave). Visitors who don't see anything new (because there are old stories in the home page photo carousel, for example) or see headlines that interest them won't stick around to read more. October's bounce rate was 5.7 percent. November's was a painful 73 percent.

A list of the top 10 stories based on pageviews shows very few garnering strong traffic. An O-Face column about different sexual appetites was the most viewed post with 706 pageviews. Last month, 10 stories attracted more views. Three of the most-viewed stories for November weren't even published last month.

Here are this month's top stories in terms of traffic:
1. College students and sex interests - 706 pageviews
2. Two Chico State students arrested by police go viral (from Aug. 30, 2016) - 545 views
3. Naughty gifts for people on your nice list (O-Face) - 541
4. First-year Chico State student died - 269
5. Chico police identify victim of Cherry Street homicide - 268
6. Mass Effect Andromeda defines wasted potential - 244
7. Crime map reports Chicoween incidents - 240
8. College athletes struggle with finances (Nov. 12, 2013) - 226
9. Shooting at Halloween party near Chico State - 226
10. Guide to gay men's body types (Feb. 7, 2015) - 204

One positive for the month was the number of Orion app downloads. Here are the November numbers from app host GoodBarber.