SiteCatalyst

This semester, I have done two projects with SiteCatalyst. First, the Omniture Web Competition and the second, a project for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These projects were great learning experiences on how to use SiteCatalyst and find meaningful data for different types of websites.

For OWAC, I learned about a business website and how to measure KPI's according sales, visits, order conversions, and others. There were product pages to follow, the order process to watch, and general format issues throughout the project. The company was profitable but the website lack a few things. First, the website had a poor design. We have all been visitors to a website. We do not read a website like a novel. We SCAN. Visitors are not going to read everything on the site, instead whatever satisfies their needs first is what they will choose. So websites need to get the most important information to visitors quickly.

Also, visitors do not want to be controlled by a website. The visitor needs to feel like they are sharing in the experience. And perhaps even feel in control. Navigating through the site was not very logical and certain links appeared only on a few pages. Unfortunately, it is asking too much of visitors to remember where to find a link or to know the site well enough to know where to go to find certain information.

For the Church, the website was informative. There were no sales or orders. It was all about sharing information. It was a little harder to evaluate a site that does not have so many numbers, but I learned a lot. It was fun to use the Click map and see where people were clicking and linking through the pages.

In the end, I can see how valuable SiteCatalyst can be to a company but it is not perfect for two reasons. First, most companies do not implement it correctly. They get it to the level of "it works" which is typical business but not always the best solution. Also, SiteCatalyst was not perfect. It is powerful and useful but I would rather use Google Anayltics for FREE then spend tens of thousands of dollars for SiteCatalyst.