CASE STUDY: How The Scotsman revamped its website

The scotsman.com website had humble beginnings in 1996, when it launched as an online version of The Scotsman newspaper, with three or four stories a day. However, it grew rapidly over the next three years, as more content from The Scotsman and its sister papers, the Evening News and Scotland on Sunday, was added to the site.

As scotsman.com grew, so did the number of internet users in the UK, and by 1999 it was obvious to the site's owners that managing multiple publications and websites was becoming inefficient. It was decided to relaunch the site as a centralised portal that would be easier to manage.

The Scotsman.com relaunched in August 2000 as a portal combining unique web content with classified ads, features and news from the newspapers. Content was grouped into ten channels covering topics such as news and property, with additional micro-sites carrying detailed coverage of particular issues and events. The relaunch was an enormous success, with traffic doubling to two million page impressions per month. By the end of the year Scotsman.com was receiving 300,000 unique visitors each month.

However, managing this growth brought additional challenges for Alistair Brown, head of online operations with The Scotsman Publications. "We took the opportunity to step back and look at how we could use technology more intelligently," he says. "We wanted to automate processes where possible and develop the search function to help improve usability."

A series of focus groups showed that visitors mainly used the site to find news, but were often unable to find what they were looking for. The site was too large and the existing search engine would only find exact matches. "If people looked for 'child friendly' restaurants, the search engine wouldn't find 'kids welcome' or 'family restaurant'," Brown explains.

In December 2000, Scotsman.com began looking for a new search and retrieval engine. Alistair Brown had previously worked for the Financial Times Group, which used a Verity search engine, but he knew that Scotsman.com had particularly demanding requirements. Scotsman.com wanted a search engine that could manage its own content, but also integrate information from the partner sites and affiliated micro-sites "We wanted to have our cake and eat it," Brown says.

For example, Scotsman.com operated a network of sites focused on the Edinburgh Festivals. The site aggregates listings information from all the theatres and venues, together with content from all member festivals. Brown wanted to bring all this information into a single database that could be searched through one interface.

After evaluating several products, Scotsman.com began trialling Convera's RetrievalWare® which was able to integrate with the company's content management system and could handle all the different content used by the site and its partners - including PDF documents, HTML files, images and text.

By August 2001, a year after the relaunch, traffic at Scotsman.com had grown to four million page impressions per month. However, the internet industry was experiencing a slowdown in advertising, and The Scotsman Publications wasn't immune. Two board members devised a new strategy whereby the Scotsman.com site would be integrated back into the parent company to cut costs.

The newly integrated site has been extremely successful. Integrating the online and offline business has cut operating costs by 65%. "The initiative has not only saved on resources, it has also resulted in a dramatically improved product for our customers," Brown adds.

Convera's RetrievalWare is a key part of that success, Brown believes. RetrievalWare went live on the site in the summer of 2001 and the results were dramatic. One of the biggest benefits is the ability users have to do concept searching so if they look for 'pubs' it will find articles about 'bars' or 'taverns' too. Since most visitors search using single words, this level of sophistication is vital in delivering accurate results first time.

RetrievalWare is also a great resource for staff who want to know more about their readers. "It's like getting an instant snapshot of Scotland. We know instantly what people are most interested in, whether it's a new job or the latest Harry Potter movie," Brown says.

More effective searching is critical to the success of a news-led site like Scotsman.com because most users are looking for something specific, Brown explains. "If people don't find what they're looking for they go elsewhere and they might not come back," he says.

Since rolling out RetrievalWare, visitor numbers and loyalty have both increased, with three quarters of registered users visiting the site at least once a day. In addition, the independent auditing group ABCe audited Scotsman.com in August 2002. The audit found the site had more than 600,000 unique visitors - an increase of 20% over the previous month. These increases are enormously important in selling advertising on the site, and generating a profit in a tough market.

While numbers are important, Brown gets more satisfaction from the feedback he has received from users. "We're getting emails from people saying at last they have a site where they find what they're looking for," Brown says. "That has an incredible benefit on the brand and helps us maintain our position as Scotland's leading internet site."



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