Clients > Fishing for a Friend
Fishing for a Friend is a social networking site that provides a perfect environment for like-minded people to meet and forge friendships.
The problem
Fishing for a Friend has been running for a number of years during which it accumulated a healthy database of members with whom the site's focus on shared interests rather than romantic connections clearly resonates.
Members and the site administrator alike however, were frustrated by the site's limited and in places broken functionality which made it a very much less attractive place to spend a lot of time.
The site also offered no opportunities to generate advertising revenue.
Our solution
- We redeveloped the site from scratch, ensuring that the core functionality performed as expected.
- We added numerous interactive features such as a forum, live chat and gallery and connected them all via "The Clubhouse" – the bustling new hub of the site. These clever, ‘sticky’ elements make it easy for visitors to access fresh and relevant information and encourage them to stay for longer and return more frequently.
- We carefully and sensitively redesigned the site layout to accommodate the new features as well as creating space for banner advertisements, while maintaining the familiar and affectionately held identity of the site embodied in the original illustrations.
Results
- Feedback from site visitors and members suggests easy and enthusiastic adoption of the new features.
- Early indications suggest that visitors are spending much longer on the site since relaunch, indicating that the new facilities and their integration throughout the site are satisfying visitors in the relevance of the content that they generate. In the months since relaunch, compared with the same months last year, unique visits have doubled and total visits trebled, while bounce rates have dropped noticeably.
What the client says
“When Fishing For a Friend outgrew its launch version, I searched for an online specialist who would help me to work out how to move forward. I wanted to offer more functionality and increase usage, cater for a wide variety of hobbies and interests and make all of this search engine friendly.
I also needed a capable developer who would not outsource and a designer who would be able to bring new and fresh ideas to an established design concept. Marketing Partners offers all that at an affordable price and with great professionalism, flexibility and bags of ideas.”