A few words about the Site...

Hi, there:

As you may know, I built http://www.filmsofafrica.com as part of a class project. The assignement also required students to write a paper about their experience as well as what the project entailed. I feel that it may be of interest to some people to read about it in this blog. Hope I won't bore you--that is not the intention other than to sepll out as to why I think the site is important and share with you about the processes I had to go through while building it.

The premise for creating www.filmsofarica.com has a lot to do with my own frustration of not being able to easily identify and access online information on African films. Searching for such information has always been a major undertaking. For long, the only sources I found somewhat helpful were either websites that announced local African Film festivals such as, (http://www.africanfilmny.org/) or the California Newsreel (http://www.newsreel.org/) which boasts an extensive catalogue of archaic films that deal with social change along with a collection of few African films. Hence, the website I have created (www.filmsofafrica.com) aims to address this problem of information scarcity by aggregating every African film into a single database.

My website aims to strike a balance between creating usable, meaningful information and brevity. It provides users the opportunity to access accurate information such as the director of a film, year and country of production, film synopsis and on some occasions, the ability to watch movie trailers. Other aspects include a film review section featuring recently released African films, customer suggestion and feedback submission method, and regularly updated blog entries that focus on the subject of African cinema. This is a well organized website that is optimized to be searchable, usable and most importantly manifests a professional appeal to its users.

Identifying Users
When creating www.filmsofafrica.com my initial step involved identifying the intended audience for the site and then figuring out what these potential users might expect to get out of the database. The next crucial step was to plan ways in which I would be able to reach these users with whom I’d hoped to maintain a long lasting relationship. In this case, my niche market would be African filmmakers, foreign film enthusiasts, and film students. These are users who would certainly appreciate a database that is simple and user friendly. By this I mean, a web page that is not over crowded with heavy text, flash animation or color schemes that could potentially distract users. I therefore decided to complement the overall design with thumbnail pictures of film posters and trailers on the main page of the site. The rest of the database would be accessed through a drop down selection on the left column of the page, where users could select and access the information on films produced in the country of their choice. This particular section would open in a different page.

Here is one problem I identified and plan to resolve soon: As a novice website designer, I have neglected the cardinal rule of website design; and that is, consistency. The film database that would open after a user makes a selection on a country of choice is actually different in design and layout from that of the main page. I have now learned that this design flaw would be rather distracting for some users who may at first think that they are re-directed to a different website. For the time being, however, I have attempted to address this issue by making certain that the overall design is consistent throughout the site (in contrast to the main page). I will also make certain that the logo, the heading and the subsequent pages are similar in design and look in relation to the main page.

The Process
Without a doubt, creating a database is not an easy task, not to mention one that is comprehensive and error free. Because www.filmsofafrica.com is a site where people would look for information on African films, it is imperative that the information I am providing is concrete, up to date and most importantly trust worthy. To achieve this, prior to constructing the site, I conducted extensive research on each and every information offered on the site. For me, next to content, credibility is a very important element when it comes to earning the trust of users. In the process I also learned that the continued existence of this website may partly depend on the type of relationship I maintain with users from the very beginning. To achieve this, what I found most helpful was providing sections where users could submit their feedback and suggestions. This is an attempt to encourage users to take an active role in helping out with this grand scheme of building a mega database for all African films.

The notion of idea sharing and responsiveness to users’ needs and feedback has a bearing on building a strong customer base. In this regard, I am sharing information with my users who in turn are doing the same by responding to my proposition. I can attest to this as there were quite a number of people who visited the website and made commendable efforts in suggesting a few films that should be included in my database. Once I received these suggestions, I further researched on the topics and posted them on the site in due time and made a point of acknowledging their support. Equally important to this venture was the fact that the website has a regularly updated blog section that pertains to the topic of African films. These aspects alone have allowed me to interact and develop a pleasant relationship with users. Some users have posted their comments and reactions to a selection of my daily blogs while others submitted their input relevant to the site itself. Although this may not be the conventional method of determining and evaluating user interface issues, the responses are indicative of users’ expectations and experiences with this site.

Methods Implemented
Throughout the process of building this website and class discussions, I’ve learned valuable lessons in which I could position my website to rank at the top of the search engine results. It was surprising to know that certain html elements (such as title tags, meta tags, alt attributes, heading tags as well as the total number of other websites that link to one’s site) make a world of difference when it comes to scoring high on search engines. For instance, when it comes to Meta keywords, popular keywords that are not repetitive have a better acceptance and search capacity than those that are superfluous or lack specificity. Interestingly enough, when it comes to ranking criteria, the type of information search engines look for vary from one search engine to the other. These may include the frequency of the keywords, the “weight” of the keywords in relation to all other words as well as keyword placement. In my case, for example, if I had not used the free meta-tag analyzer service on http://www.scrubtheweb.com, I would not have detected early enough that the way I had initially structured my meta-tag had violated the above mentioned rules and hence was not considered search engine friendly. The keywords I had used were very repetitive and had too many characters to describe what my site was about.

As a provider of viable information, I have come to realize the importance of implementing techniques that would help increase traffic to my new site. For instance, I found signing up with Google ad words to be an effective way of letting the world recognize that my site is the newest cool addition to the virtual world. When I signed up for Google ad words, I allocated $50 per month with a $0.15 per click payment plan. I soon learned that it was necessary for me to select much targeted keywords that could trigger my ad so that only specific visitors will get to see my ad and my conversion ration will be relatively high. I determined that key terms such as African films, African Cinema, e.t.c. would be relevant in this case. A few minutes later I tested this by signing on Google and conducting a search by using some of the terms I had indicated. To my surprise the ad for my site was displayed on the first page of Google.

A day later I checked in my account for Google ad words and found out that because there were clicks on my ad Google had charged me $1.60. Fearing that I would soon run out of my $50 allowance, I decided to experiment and reduce the initial $0.15 per click down to $0.08 per click. Surprisingly, my ads were no longer showing up on Google under any of the search terms I had assigned. I waited for five days and continued to regularly monitor my account. To my dismay, however, there were no clicks to my ads. It wasn’t until I raised a question during a class period that I realized what had possibly gone wrong. The fact that I downgraded the number of times my ad would show up in relation to the allocated money had a lot to do with this phenomenon. In fact, as soon as I upgraded the ad words allocation to $.25 my ad began to show up under almost all of the search terms I had assigned.
On a similar note, the Google ad sense program proved to be a great business model that worked to my advantage. I signed up with Google in order to display random ads on a few of the pages on my website. Apparently there were some customers who clicked on these ads generating some revenue. I also signed up for Google analytics in order to monitor which pages on my site were being visited and when. To do this, I had to cut and paste the html code from the Google site and imbed it in each page of my site’s html document. This was a rather difficult undertaking for my particular site as I would have to embed this code into each page of the database, which happens to be numerous. Therefore, I selected a few pages I assumed would be mostly visited, the index, about us, and suggestion pages.

Getting the word out
The importance of advertising either through the traditional word of mouth or paid advertising cannot be underestimated. A few days after I had built the site, I realized that I would need to improve the ways in which I could communicate with people about the existence of my new website. I sent mass emails to several of my friends who in turn forwarded my message to others. Another method was the old fashion networking scheme where by I listed relevant and useful links on my site and the other sites returned the favor by listing mine on their website. As I mentioned previously, the number of outside links to other sites also plays a role in how search engines determine a site’s ranking. I also found other social networking sites such as www.myspace.com, www.facebook.com, www.fanbox.com, to be useful places to advertise and invite users to my site for free. Getting multiple listings and trying to make a website’s pages appear as high in search results as possible is desirable. In addition to google.com, www.dmoz.org offers free URL submission protocol to get listed on several search engines. Once the submission is made, the process to get indexed may take about 3 weeks, then a couple of months for the listing to start showing up on the search engines that use DMOZ.
Through the course of working on this website, one interesting aspect that soon became a hobby of mine was perhaps analyzing the web statistics information. Everyday I would sign in and monitor the changes and analyze the number of unique visitors that came to my site, the cities, countries and the frequently visited pages on my site. (See sample 4) This was rather fascinating because I was amazed by how fast information gets disseminated over the internet. People in the Philippines, Korea and even Japan have visited my site.

Although every day I would notice an increase in the number of unique visitors to the site, I knew there were days in which the activity was rather low. I knew I had to drive more traffic to my site in order to rank a better score with the Google search engine. One day in particular by 9:00 am in the morning, I realized I only had 32 visitors. I quickly signed on the famous community website, www.craigslist.org and placed an announcement stating that I needed the input of website designers as to the aesthetics of my site. A few hours later I was amazed to notice a spike in the number of unique visitors. The number had risen to 149 unique visitors most of whom actually sent me email messages in response to my call.

What the future holds
This project has been a rewarding experience from the beginning despite the challenges it had presented. My apprehension of not being able to successfully build an effective website had soon dissipated upon receiving congratulatory remarks from some users. Therefore, as part of an effort to keep this site operational over a long term, I have decided to keep expanding not only the database itself, but also the daily blog entries on http://filmsofafrica.blogspot.com. I would make certain that the blogs have clearly defined goals and themes that are of quality and relevance. It is also my hope that this website will continue to serve as the best source of information for African films.