McManus Creative: How to build an effective website

Having worked with the likes of Yahoo!, Disney and iVillage, I know my way around websites. I know that a good website needs to be:

easy on the eyes
easy to figure out
easy to maintain

But more importantly, I know that business owners need a web profressional who is easy to work with. That's me. I have a knack for understanding what my clients want and doing what makes them happy.

The Story of My Work Life

A web consultant

My main money gigs are working for the likes of Yahoo! and Disney, consulting on various projects related to community, usually having to do with women.

A New York big wig

Prior to living the consultant life, I worked in New York City as Vice President of Product Development and Usability for iVillage.com. If you don't know about iVillage, it is one of the largest websites in the world, with more than 13 million visitors a month.

Before working at iVillage, I was a Senior Producer for one of the early AOL channels, the Hub.

And before working for the Hub, I produced 12 Hachette-Filipacci magazines including Metropolitan Home, Car and Driver, Popular Photography and more.

And before working for the magazines, I put together the website for a Boston ad agency, Pagano Schenck & Kay, back in the day when we were all saying "HTTP what?"

Building a huge topical navigation system

At iVillage I undertook an incredibly large project, creating a topical system of navigation for thousands of various pages within iVillage. iVillage had sprung up as several different sites, built by different people, with different sensibilities. We saw that people were coming to iVillage looking for something particular, but leaving without finding it, even though we might have covered that topic extensively if only you know where to look.

Digression about AOL

Well, at the time I was the Director of Distribution, which meant that I oversaw all sorts of partner relationships and did whatever I could to make sure that these partners sent us lots of visitors. The biggest partner was AOL. I had recently established a new method for getting lots of links form AOL; we busted our butts!

Previously, AOL had been paying us to be on their service. They had recently made the jarring and painful switch to making us pay to be on their service, and pay through the nose. Surely we could expect AOL to be sending us lots of traffic if we were paying customers, right? That's not how it worked. Turns out they were also sending traffic to our biggest competitor, who was also paying through the nose.

So I saw the writing on the wall, realized that we couldn't stand on ceremony, or complain about what AOL should be doing for us. I saw that we needed to scramble to be the best partner, the dream partner, the partner that says "How high?" every time AOL says jump. By doing so, we clobbered the competition in getting links from this very valuable source of traffic. The cost per click for the deal plummeted (which is very good) and, in the long run, we ended up buying our largest competitor. Now, I can't take credit for that, but I sometimes wonder if our will-do attitude with AOL might have made a significant contribution.

Back to the navigation system

In my role as Director of Distribution, I knew the enormous iVillage network inside and out. I knew where all the pregnancy info was and all the hidden pockets of diet tips and the full extent of the tools and quizzes on the site. So I raised my hand to volunteer to pull together a system to unify the experience at iVillage and, most of all, to help women find what they are looking for. They gave me the title of Executive Director of Network Navigation and put me to work.

The first thing we did was to fix search. We got a new search partner and went through all the pages on the network to improve the meta tags and meta titles.

Then we hunkered down to plan a topic system. I worked with about 30 different people on this project: coaching, cajoling, kowtowing, directing, deadlining, and whipcracking. There was a certain way of asking questions of the tech guys and a certain way of explaining realities to the editorial staff. It was very tricky.

We started off putting ourselves in the shoes of our audience. We imagined what the woman who clicks on a parenting site would be concerned about. What are her biggest concerns? And then we structured the top level of the topic system according to the words we imagined were topmost in her mind. Then we double checked our instincts with some real data. We examined the search words that women typed in on iVillage, and made sure that the words we were using to name our topics matched the words that women were typing in. We used the same thought process as we went deeper into each topic. What are the biggest concerns of a woman who clicks on potty training?

At the same time that we were making the topics easy to drill down into, we also realized that web users don't always drill down. Sometimes they go sideways, so we built into the the topic system a way of navigating sideways, to other topics that are related. I think we called them cousin topics.

In all there were over 2,000 topics at iVillage, each one aggregating articles, tools, quizzes, chats, message boards and products. The project took approximately eight months and after it launched it became an underlying architecture that allowed for easily targeted ads and product placement, contributing to the bottom line in the tough years of the dot com bust.

Surviving the busted economy

iVillage has made it through the darkest days of the dot com economy, and I survived several rounds of layoffs. It was very wrenching to see your friends pack up and go, and very discouraging to try to piece together your work life and your team with a fraction of the support.

Nonetheless, I found myself with a promotion to Vice President of Product Development and Usability. This was shortly after my other greatest accomplishment at iVillage: relaunching seven Hearst Magazines in 6 months.

Seven magazines in six months

When iVillage bought its largest competitor, Women.com, along came seven top shelf magazine sites: Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, Country Living, Victory and Town and Country. The task I undertook was to completely relaunch every page of each of these sites onto our system of publishing. We had to devise templates that felt custom-built to suit the magazines specificly, while all the while these templates were really standardized to promote efficiency and cost-savings. Again, there were thousands of pages. But this time there were some very demanding magazine editors to please and strict deadlines to meet.

The story has some details that might be only interesting to other people who struggle with building flexible templates for publishing content to the web. Suffice it to say, we did it. I produced the most detailed project plan, mustered the most upbeat think-ahead team management, and made the most crucial split-second decisions of my life.

A simpler life

I left iVillage in July 2003 after five years. (That's 25 in internet years.) My goal was to move back to Maine to the town where my mother grew up, where people wave at you when they drive by whether they know you or not. For the most part I do not miss the rush rush rush of the big projects I used to work on, but there is something deeply satisfying about a superhuman team effort that meets some impossible goal.

What I like about my business, McManus Creative, is that I'm able to work one-on-one with people who have very specific needs. Many of whom have never been told the difference between a hit and a pageview, a visit and a visitor, a jpeg and gif. Many of whom get sold a bill of goods by web professionals who may not have their clients best interest in mind. As for me, I've spent years in a world in which efficiency is the greatest good, and I could never urge anyone, especially not a client, to do more than they need to in order to meet their goals.

If you have read this story to this point, bravo for you! I hope that you are interested enough in my service to email or give me a call. In any case, good luck on your project!

See my philosophy and method spelled out in How to Build an Effective, Usable Website.