Half way to 100,000 hits – in just 12 months

The new-look LARSOA website was launched this time last year - on Wednesday 5 June 2002 to be precise. In this feature we look at the thinking behind the new site - and at the progress the website project has made in the past 12 months.

"If anyone had suggested this time last year that before the end of May 2003 we would have attracted in excess of 45,000 hits I think everyone on the website project team would have thought they were being wildly optimistic," says LARSOA secretary Brian Hogarth.

Without doubt, the new-look website has been an unqualified success. On average, the site attracts around 1000 hits and 300 visitors each week and is now established as the best place to find out what is going on in the world of road safety in the UK.

So how has this level of success been achieved in such a relatively short period of time?

A novel approach
It was in the first quarter of 2002 that the contract for the production of a new website for LARSOA was put out to tender. As the tender was nationally advertised it attracted a healthy level of interest from design and marketing consultancies, one of which was Norfolk based Stennik – well known for its road safety publicity work in eastern England.

Stennik’s managing director Nick Rawlings put forward an intriguing proposal. "Instead of simply producing a new website, why don’t you deliver a news service for the road safety sector?" he challenged the project team. Although this sounded ambitious, he was able to demonstrate – from a previous project – that it is possible to deliver a credible news service via a website.

Following presentations, the website project team – John Billington (Sandwell), Brian Hogarth (LARSOA secretary), David Lindsay (North Yorkshire), Alan Kennedy (Durham) and Rosemary Welch (Essex) - was bold enough to award Stennik the contract and appoint Nick Rawlings news editor. This project team remains in place today, with the exception of Rosemary Welch who moved on to other challenges once the website was launched.

Key elements
Initially the team met monthly for the first three months, but this has been reduced to bi-monthly now the website is established. While Nick Rawlings takes responsibility for the news content, other sections of the site – the calendar, links and resources etc – are managed by the other team members. Another Stennik employee, designer Simon Rawlings (Nick’s brother) – is responsible for the design and functionality of the site.

Stennik proposed three core elements to the news content and these remain the same one year on – a weekly round up of road safety news stories, a monthly update of road safety campaigns and a monthly feature on a topical issue. The weekly news round up is a potted version of stories that appear elsewhere – on other websites, in printed magazines and in press information supplied by the DfT and others. The monthly members’ news section is compiled from information supplied by authorities from across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - and by the editorial team following up leads and digging out stories.

Going live
The new site was piloted to a restricted audience during April and May and went live after the Jubilee weekend in June 2002. The first ‘edition’ comprised 10 news stories and by the end of week one the site had attracted 516 hits and 142 visitors. A ‘hit’ is a click on the website homepage – each visitor will therefore create one or more hits, depending on the number of times they return to the homepage.

There were three elements to the project that were key to its success.

First, generating enough interesting and newsworthy content. "This has never really been a problem," says Nick Rawlings. "Once road safety professionals saw the site they were keen to see their campaign featured and we quickly found ourselves in the happy position of material coming to us rather than having to go out and chase it."

Regularity of publishing has also been critical. "To succeed we needed to get readers into the habit of visiting the site regularly and to achieve this we had to publish regularly. The weekly news round up is published every Monday morning before 7.30am, and in the year we have been operating we haven’t missed that deadline once," Nick Rawlings adds.

Informing the road safety community about the site has also been fundamental to its success. An email database was constructed and once a week a reminder is sent out telling people the site has been updated. "We know this is effective because immediately the email is sent out the numbers rise. We conducted an experiment one week by not sending out the reminder and the numbers dropped by 50 per cent," Rawlings explains.

Hit and visitor numbers built steadily from week one. The 1000 hits in a week barrier was broken for the first time in September, and in November the site achieved 300 visitors in a week for the first time.

The highest number of weekly hits to date – 1565 - was achieved in the first week of 2003. And the highest number of visitors to date – 404 – was achieved in early February. Although numbers have levelled out in the last couple of months, they still remain very healthy and consistent.

The future
As for the future, the project team has discussed increasing the frequency of publishing members’ news updates from monthly to weekly – the only constraint is funding. "Publishing members news more frequently would involve more journalism and thus would naturally cost more," explains Brian Hogarth. "We haven’t ruled this out but are not yet in a position to commit to this."

Footnote: further information about the LARSOA website can be obtained from Brian Hogarth, bhograth@bun.com or Nick Rawlings, nrawlings@stennik.com.