GVS is now part of Acquia.

Getting In To Grad School - Redesign with New Functions

Background

Getting In To Grad School has been helping students achieve their dream of acceptance since 1995. With an online book and a more complete physical book, Dave Burrell provides guidance for grad school hopefuls. One side effect of the site is that Dave got a fair amount of direct personal mail asking for adivce which he would answer. While he recognized that these conversations would be useful to other people, Dave didn't have the time to post the emails to the site in its static format. Also, while the site had great traffic from a large number of organic links, the design did not perform well in search engine rankings.

Goals

The main goals of this project were

Provide discussion forums where students could help other students with archived advice
Implement advertising in a non-intrusive way to gain a passive income stream
Improve the Search Engine Ranking to help people find the useful information site
Make the site easy for Dave to update
Freshen up the look of the site

Implementation

Two key parts of the implementation process were to redirect the old pages to the new site and to "pre-load" the forums with all of the emails that Dave had received and sent over the years. Thus, the site "hit the ground running" with useful content in the forums promoting new users to add their own content and with a large number of organic links directing the same steady stream of daily users.

Aside from that, the site is a relatively standard installation with a few special features I created to make administration tasks easier for Dave and to improve the search engine optimization of the site.

Results

Within a few weeks of implementation the site was ranking very well for a variety of search terms. More and more users were finding the site via search engines and directing their friends to visit as well. Site statistics show new links since the site was redeveloped coming from blogs, forums, and networking sites like Orkut. People are finding the site, finding valuable information, and recommending it to others.

We are in the process of optimizing the advertising, but it's already making money for Dave.

And there have been several people who joined the site to post their questions and ideas into the discussion forums. These new posts are automatically included into the site so that Dave doesn't have to edit the website code by hand.