For the last year of so we've split test five websites to best determine the type of design most beneficial to our audience. After serious scrutiny our tests confirmed exactly what we always expected to see: an entry landing page converted extremely well but page-views were compromised. However, a page showcasing our content enjoyed more page-views at the expense (however marginal) on relationship conversions.

Since we're not your pedestrian marketing agency, we felt it was appropriate to share direct access to the thousands of articles on our website... but we didn't want to compromise on the higher conversions enjoyed by way of a landing page. The solution came by way of our site-entry splash page plugin (now provided by default in our Client plugin). The splash plugin forces a geographically relevant or defined splash page on site-entry. The power of using a 'defined' splash page comes from the feature that permits us to serve a particular page based on the origin of the visitor. For example, if a visitor finds us by way of an email signature we can serve an entry splash page specific to that individual. If a visitor finds us by way of a social platform profile link or any other location we can serve relevant higher-converting content that is more likely to be beneficial to visitors from that source. While the splash pages are rather crude at the time of writing, we'll be working on them over the next month or so to improve upon the aesthetics.

Prior to February of last year we used Internoetics as a dumping ground for code and other information that didn't typically contain information our clients were looking for... or at least that's the misguided option we held until recently (I'm using the term 'we' so even those that disagreed with we might share some collective blame). In an effort to consolidate our online presence we migrated most of the Internoetics content over to BeliefMedia -- a sensible decision since our clients were (and remain) the motivation behind virtually every post we write. Unlike most marketing companies, we're a real technology company with a significant and high-profile history in the marketing arena, and we need to share that expertise. Having a fractional online presence didn't make sense... and that's precisely the feedback our recent split test provided. The split testing revealed that if we made the information immediately available to our visitors they'd browse significantly more than the site that served a single landing page. In a sense we've returned back to early design concepts by providing a 'busy' magazine-style format - something that's completely inconsistent with what you'll see from those that share the marketing space.

Migration Woes

Other issues were identified by way of our testing. Some of our Australian audience were often put off by the .com domain, with many of them expecting to see a .com.au presence... so, we moved the website to BeliefMedia.com.au (preserving all redirects, of course). In moving the website over to our secure .com.au domain we encountered more than a few issues that turned a simple 15-minute exercise into a three day marathon. Many of the issues were encountered by way of a theme (with bizarre CSS behavior) that forced the rewrite of hundreds of functions. The SSL 'padlock-compliance' also meant replacing all non-secure elements - something we'll have to now go through and alter (as an option) in all our downloadable shortcodes. To say we're not finished with the rebuild is an understatement. Expect changes.

Migrating a website is never an easy decision. You'll generally lose all social proof associated with page shares, and SEO is potentially affected. While not concerned about the social counts, we will, of course, redirect each request for an existing .com URL to the new and secure .com.au website. While those redirections will always be honoured, it's highly likely we'll build an international standalone website on the .com domain.

Leveraging Time

Because of the large number of websites and ecommerce shopfronts we operate, we tend to mirror designs over multiple unrelated websites. This is done simply so we may leverage time by writing common functions into a single plugin that applies across multiple platforms. This requirement placed additional pressure upon our team because we had to ensure that the BelifMedia design would be suitable for a suite of other websites (including ASJ , FLIGHT , and others). If you're following some of our other projects, you can expect to see significant changes soon.

Our client platform, all our API services, and some other features will continue to be hosted on the .com. domain.