Building Intelligent Websites with Drupal

Editor's Notes

• #3: What is an intelligent website? It is a system for integrating data to support better decision making.If you think about a typical website even with a CMS as sophisticated as Drupal, there are really no systems for making better decisions. It would be like building a robot that can move around but not giving them any eyes, ears or other sensors. They are blind and no mater how well built might be just bumping into walls an no one would ever know it.So another way to think of an intelligence system is as a set of sensors and feedback loops to give the brain the information it needs.
• #4: What is the problem we solving?What design
• #5: The focus of the Intelligence system can be broken down into two areas:Behavioral analytics: E.g. what are people doing on my siteIdentity: Who are these people
• #6: What are we ultimately trying to achieve? To make smarter websites. The real brains behind a website is the web team. The people building the features, doing the design, creating the content and making the marketing decisions.What we are really doing is making them smarter.
• #7: So what would systems thinking look like as applied to websites. Well first we would have the system, aka the websites. The system is a black box. It’s interworking's are complex and difficult to observer directly.What we can control is the inputs. There is creative…Most websites are built and modified simply using heuristics for best practices. We all have mental models of what we think will work best. If you have insightful metal models, then you should get positive results. But how do we know?This is a perfectly valid approach to web development. Heuristics enable to develop efficiently and launch fast with a well reasoned set of features. But we can’t stop there. Mental models are only part of the equation. Of course there is a simple way to measure the output. Analtyics. By using a system like Google Analytics we can get over 200 metrics about our site. Number of visitors, page views, bounce rates and so on. But volume metrics are only part of the picture. The really question is are people doing things of value. Is the site impacting the bottom line?Google Analytics also has a way of measuring using conversion goals. If you use goals properly you can start to get a good idea of how much value you website is producing. But not all value can be measured in conversions. Blogs are declaring 2014 the year of engagement. Engagement builds traffic, brand and audience. To get a full picture we need to measure engagement events such as social sharing and blog comments.Google Analtyics does have events tracking. However, it is not automatic. It is left to the website to push events into Google Analytics.
• #8: So lets say we built out a system that measures all these outputs. We now are ready to apply systems thinking. We are measuring all the important outputs, 200 or so volume metrics, goals and events. The reality is that that is to much to juggle. How much What we need to do next is normalize our outputs so they can be compared. We can do this by assigning values. [transition]Aw, awesome. We now can boil down although metrics to a single number. So as change the inputs we know the value the site is producing. All everyone need to do is to look at Google Analytics each day and they will know how much value the site is producing. The problem is, how many people have looked at your analytics recently. When was the last time your designer, developer project manager, content authors looked at Google Analytics. They are the ones making the decisions. We need to make the data as transparent as possible. To do that we need it to live where the decision makers work. In the CMS.So once we have the metrics available, now everybody knows how the site is doing. Each day is it producing more or less value. Then the question gets asked? What elements are producing the value. Can we break down our success to its components. So it is not enough to collect this data, we have to tie it to individual components.