Our Client, The Scholarly Kitchen Receives Award for Website Redesign
On June 28, 2018, The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) received a silver award at the Association Media & Publishing Annual EXCEL Awards, which recognizes the best and the brightest in association media and publishing.
Recognizing Outstanding Website or App Performance
To win an EXCEL Award, you must have a website or mobile app targeted at the public, the association’s membership, or other stakeholder groups. The award recognizes blogs, websites, and apps that achieve a high level of influence or help the organization reach its goals in an outstanding way.
How The Scholarly Kitchen Excelled
The Society for Scholarly Publishing established The Scholarly Kitchen (TSK) in February 2008 to keep SSP members and interested parties informed of new developments in the publishing industry. This has helped attract the community of Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) information experts and give them a place to contribute.
Since its launch, The Scholarly Kitchen has grown significantly. The blog is currently read by thousands of publishers, editors, librarians, researchers, and publishing service providers in more than 200 countries every day. With more than 8,600 subscribers to daily content alerts, 17,600 followers on Twitter, 604,000 site visits each year, and 1.4 million page views annually, it’s clear TSK is making an impact.
But, how is TSK contributing to the community? Community members are able to stay up to date on developments in publishing and read up on key research reports and projects. They benefit from high-quality content and interesting perspectives from a variety of professional authors.
A Website Redesign That Propelled TSK Toward Its Goals
In early 2017, The Society for Scholarly Publishing decided that it was time to give their website new life. They felt that a redesigned website would serve both their audience and contributors better and motivate more people to get involved. They contacted Windmill Design to be their partner in redesigning their website.
The result was a website that they were delighted to call their own. Melanie Dolechek, the Executive Director of SSP, noted, “The team at Windmill Design did an outstanding job of creating an updated, modern website that is both attractive and extremely functional. The project was managed very well, and the final output truly captured the vision of the SSP volunteers who manage the blog.”
However, it wasn’t just the leadership team that was happy. The public also responded well to the site redesign and its improved user experience. Since the new site was launched they’ve seen a quarterly increase in page views of over 35,000 and in visitors of over 21,000. Direct email subscriptions also saw impressive improvements going from 1,679 at the beginning of 2017 to 6,690 at year-end. All of this resulted in increases in ad revenue. In the first 3 quarters, TSK was able to exceed budget expectations by 33%.
If you’d like to read more about The Scholarly Kitchen’s award and what it means, check out the official media release.
Want Your Website to Have a Bigger Impact?
If your website is stuck in 1999 and you’re ready to take advantage of a modern, optimized design, contact Windmill Design. We’ll learn about you and your business goals and show you how our design process can create a cohesive online experience that can help you reach those goals.