Please tell us what you think! Our new site design launched today.

We hope you like the look and feel of our new site, updated today! I'm really pleased with it, but it's your view that counts. So please tell us what you think we may have got right or wrong via the Kampyle feedback button or contact us and then we will make more tweaks.

We'd like to thank the hundreds of visitors have given feedback since we soft-launched the site in February - as outlined later in this post we have taken a lot of what  you have said on board.

I'd also like to personally thank our expert digital marketing commentators who have contributed some fantastic, most popular, most useful posts on the site. Your efforts in sharing your expertise are really appreciated.

Thanks, Dave Chaffey

What's New? We're moving from a blog to a portal

Aside from the refined brand ident and visuals, the most significant change we have made in the new design is to add a topbar navigation to highlight the most useful posts in different areas that need to be managed by a digital marketer. We hope to become a natural place that marketers turn to find out the advice on a specific challenge of digital marketing they're grappling with - both from our recommendations and comments shared by other marketers.

For example, this page shows our introduction to SEO and recommendations on the most relevant and most recent posts.

Why I love blogs / Why I hate blogs?

Blogs have rightly become unrivalled as a way of sharing news and advice, but for me they suffer a fatal flaw :  findability... Blogs are great for highlighting what's currently most popular, but new or regular visitors can't readily find the best content about the issue that is currently challenging them. I also believe that quality blog posts should have longevity - not just get a short-term spike of readers. This Jakob Nielsen article "Write articles, not blog posts" summarises my philosophy to providing useful content.

Anyone running a blog should try to use features like widgets to show the most popular, most commented boxes to help here, but they don't readily show what's most popular or most useful in a category - most category archive pages are just a long listing of posts in order of when posted. This is where we hope our top bar nav and the editorial about the key issues to consider for managing a topic will help.

Your feedback on the site

We have found the Kampyle feedback service really useful for changing our site - we average around 30 comments per month of which 5-10 have specifics to act on. It's good to see we have a rating of 4.2 / 5.

Here our some examples I collated for us to discuss for the redesign showing what we thought we should take action on:

I start with more specifics that require action:

1. "I"€™ve only just arrived here"€¦ so i haven"€™t had time to form a proper opinion. it looks a bit like a twitter site! i searched for attribution and nothing came up!"

love the idea though. will give you more feedback as i play around the site, bbx

>> Action : New Google Search integration will help here plus top-nav.

2. "Quite hard to find the information I wanted and when I got to the right section (social media) couldn"€™t find anything substantial. What I was looking for was an overview of how social media is being used by businesses and some top tips for social media campaigns. Just found a lot of generic marketing spiel ("€œthe sixth senses of social media marketing etc"€), that wasn"€™t useful or informative".

Previous Dave Chaffey site may have been uglier, but the information was better.

Also: loads of stuff on it "€“ for a first time visitor it was overwhelming

>> The summary pages available from top nav will help here this since will have prioritise links at top and will link to some articles on old site e.g. OVP until we"€™re able to attract visitors through search to our site

>> Also need the home page / About to guide people where to go "€“ so need to change the home page template somehow.

>> Stu "€“ any ideas on how to do that or should just try the menus"€¦

3. "Hi Dave, this site is a huge improvement on your old one. But please can you ditch that awful welcome message that appears at the top of each article "€“ if I want to subscribe to you enews / twitter /

rss then I know where / how to do that. Just let me read the article I"€™ve requested! Also, your enews looks pretty ropey in Lotus Notes. Otherwise, all good."

>> Action "€“ OK one view that strong is enough for us to ditch that since others will feel the same although should be first time visitors only really "€“ I have switched it off. OK?

4. "How can I find a list of articles by author?"

>> Need to make more prominent "€“ authors on right?

Example of other comments :

• Familiar Blog type layout with very useful content, like how it is tagged with tactic/ topics/ advice type etc.
• So much good stuff "€“ so little time to read it 🙂
• I find the site really easy to navigate and get around nice simple, clean design! Thanks!
• Pleasant interface, but there tends to be too much info on one page at a time.
• Easy to navigate and clean look. I"€™d like to be able to e-mail articles to friends not just put on twitter etc
• Excelllent, in depth, informative, cutting edge
• I wish I had more brain power to comprehend some of this stuff, SEO
• Very useful and timely info
• Great content! Always fresh, always latest, always comprehensive. Thanks.
• Thanks for all the great articles, much appreciated.
• Useful and up to date expert content.
• Liked content. Useful. Clearly stated. Good. Will return.
• So much good stuff "€“ so little time to read it 🙂
• Great content. Always an excellent resource.
• Interesting information on web reputation monitoring tools
• Could use some Analytics insights or examples of data with insights to show how to look at the data and create a story from it.
• Excellent, would be lost without all your advise!
• Excellent, informative and easy to understand content, great for us newbies!