Awards:
'Outstanding Achievement'
codegent is a full service web development new media agency, based in clapham, london, uk, that delivers well-designed content managed sites, microsites and flash games supported by robust technology and integrated marketing solutions including search engine optimisation, pay-per-click and html email.
A UK based careers advice service for teenagers. They needed a strategy for improving retention and engagement to fit in with their expansion plans.
b-live.com is a UK based company specialising in careers advice for 14 - 19 year olds. They approached Codegent with a brief to redesign and reinvigorate an existing site of 100 000 members which had taken them as far as it could.
The main focus of the site is to help members understand that the skills they develop by doing the things they enjoy are also the skills that employers look for when hiring. The main problem b-live faced was that kids were not staying on the site long enough to make this connection and content was ultimately going to too few people and the wrong type of user.
Retention was the single biggest problem the old site was facing, as users were only coming on approximately once a month and staying on the site for just a few minutes. We needed to somehow engage the users as the longer we could keep the interested, the easier it would be to feed them relevant informative content that they were previously unaware of.
The site needed to compete on a functional level with other sites that our audience were using (Bebo, Facebook and MySpace) but at the same time it needed to be safe and highly secure. On top of this it needed to deliver relevant, career-based content.
Our approach was to incorporate cutting edge social networking tools such as UGC, user configurable homepages, avatars and instant messaging to provide engaging tools and a platform for users to interact with each other, providing a safe alternative to existing social networking sites.
Engaging our users would increase site usage and allow us to do two things; Firstly create user profiles for each site member and secondly push relevant careers and educational content based on these user profiles.
Early indications suggest that user conversions (the percentage of users clicking through to career-based content) is up by an average of 400%.
Intuitive, intelligent registration processes have meant user drop-off rates at registration are down 80% and the whole site is backed up by a comprehensive content management system that provides b-live with the ability to create, schedule, and preview content as well as report extensively on the on-site performance of this content. This allows our client to better target and tune the positioning of content to fully exploit their newly engaged audience.
Client site administration time has also been slashed by automating content scheduling, registration, advertising and report management.
