MyFreshPlans.com is Haden Interactive’s lab site. We initially launched it in April, 2011. I had been working with Artsedge, the Kennedy Center’s educational website, and one of my jobs was to find good sites to link to for all the lesson plans I wrote.
There I was with PageRank 8 links to hand out, and I had a terrible time finding any good websites to give them to.
Over the months I worked on the project, I grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of good educators’ websites, especially in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. We needed a website to use for SEO experiments and Google Analytics trainings anway, so we figured we’d build a great educators’ site with a focus on 21st century skills. Two birds with one stone.
FreshPlans was the result.
FreshPlans was our first WordPress website. Jay Jaro and Shan Pesaru were the designers on the project, Rebecca and Josepha wrote new blog posts each weekday and created new videos each week, and we funded the site with affiliate marketing. Within a year, we had gone from a handful of visitors to 15,000 a month.
FreshPlans had some adventures along the way. We were featured in the Google Doodle, we won a small grant (for Big Ideas) that funded our ebooks, we were included in the now-defunct Google Pangaeans program, and — unlike our client sites, where we never take SEO risks — we got smacked down in an algorithm update.
FreshPlans isn’t a typical website, but it began to have some of the same issues we see with clients every day:
- We got super busy with our business and stopped posting regularly. This happens to — let me just check our records — 100% of businesses that try to do their own blogging and content marketing.
- Our website was the victim of its own success. We proved definitively that a steady stream of high quality content works better than anything else you can do for SEO, so there was less reason to run SEO experiments. Businesses often get complacent about their websites and figure they shouldn’t fix something that ain’t broken, but the internet doesn’t work that way. When we stopped posting regularly, our traffic fell just as steadily as it had grown. We now get about 6,500 visits per month — not bad, but not nearly as good as the 22,000 we were getting before we slacked off.
- Business conditions changed. In the case of FreshPlans, our state was removed from the allowed Amazon affiliate states because of changes in the sales tax rules. That made an enormous difference in the site’s revenue. We didn’t really make any changes at the website, either. We often see this with businesses: things change in the business, revenue streams are different, but the website doesn’t reflect those changes. Once Amazon started collecting sales tax, Arkansas was allowed back in. Again, we made no changes.
- Our C suite began to question the ROI of the website. Now, Rosie had a point when she announced that she didn’t want any more company time going toward FreshPlans unless it could pay its way. With 700 posts, FreshPlans continued to be a worthwhile resource for teachers, and we could still show its analytics (though we didn’t enjoy it as much). But we see businesses which use their website as their primary marketing vehicle and see success…and decide that all their success is the result of their personal charm and magnetism or something. They tell us that the website isn’t really important and they don’t want to invest in it any more. We always try to be courteous in these conversations, and not to gloat when they see the results later. But those experiences didn’t stop us, when we were being businesslike, from questioning the value of our lab website.
- We let our site get outdated. In our case, it wasn’t that the code was outmoded, as we often see with clients, and it wasn’t that we ignored required WordPress updates. But our original FreshPlans site was not responsive or mobile-friendly at all. When mobile traffic was 2% of our total traffic, that didn’t matter so much. Now, it’s about one quarter of our traffic — and that proportion will probably be higher now that we have a responsive site. The site had also gotten slow, often a sign that your site needs updating.
After months of discussion and thought, we relaunched FreshPlans 2.0 in 2014.
FreshPlans 2.0
Our second version of the site is shown below. Jay Jaro helped us again with a responsive design and an updated look.
It’s been ten years since that relaunch. We still use FreshPlans as our lab site, it’s still beneficial for K-12 teachers, and it’s still sort of languishing with a new blog post every month or two. We’re thinking it needs another relaunch. It’s still functional, but we have new ideas and it looks a bit dated.
What’s in the future for FreshPlans? We don’t really know. I still think of it as our community service, and I hope we’ll get back to providing fresh new content for teachers on a regular basis. I also know that serving our clients will always take precedence, so that may or may not actually happen.
But we don’t have to be embarrassed to show FreshPlans to people any more.
Do you find yourself apologizing for your website? Relaunching your website doesn’t have to be painful. We thought about it for a long time, but the actual work took less than a week. Our site was never down at all, and our visitors probably didn’t even realize we had done it till they noticed the new look.
Contact us to talk about your website — we’ll help you decide if it needs relaunching, and we’ll help you get it done, too.
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