Digital Drivers - Perry Nelson

February 6, 2007

Perry Nelson
Online Director
Dwell

Perry Nelson, who joined Dwell in San Francisco in August 2003 as Associate Business Manager after having been Production Associate with Surface, rose to online manager a year later and became online director in August 2005. Earlier in her career, she was on the account team for SBC and Sutter Home at ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners until December 2001. A member of the Bay Area Interactive Group, Nelson also serves on the MPA Digital Committee that developed content for the February 27 Magazines 24/7 Digital Conference, where she will also provide a case study on a recent dwell.com relaunch. She also served as judge for the inaugural MPA Digital Awards.

Q. What's the most heavily trafficked area of your Web site?

A. The homepage and the Dwelling section are the two most popular areas on the site. The Dwellings section primarily contains content from the residential features in the magazine. The DesignSource is another heavily trafficked section of the site. That alone averages about 100,000 page views a month. Our users are excited to be able to browse through the listings for architects and designers, builders and contractors. For dwell.com all told, our page views have doubled since the re-launch last year—from 300,000 to 600,000. As we add more content and encourage user interaction, we expect that number to keep growing.

Q. What are the two most popular stories or features on the site right now? Does any one feature stand out as a "blockbuster" in terms of online readership in, say, the past three months?

A. A recent story, “LEEDing the Way,” about a LEED-certified green prefab home, was one of our most e-mailed stories. (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.) “Desert Utopia,” another popular story, covers the Marmol Radziner prefab home outside of Palm Springs, California. Our users have also been excited to contribute to the site: A new area under our "Connect" heading—“For Rent”—features their smart apartment upgrades.

Q. Did you design your site based on traffic patterns or focus group input...or a little of both?

A. We conducted a small survey with our most loyal community members, which informed the overall strategy for dwell.com. An internal team, with members from every department at Dwell, worked to relaunch our site last June.

Q. For the web, did you hire people from outside the print world? Or did your existing print staff have to learn a new skill set?

A. Our brand strategy team worked with an interactive design agency to relaunch dwell.com last summer. Dwell works with experts in different sectors, including interactive designers, developers and multimedia engineers to enable us to produce video, podcasts, all of the functionality of the site, without having to bring it all in-house. And now, the great thing about our content management system is that it’s easy to publish content; our editors are able to publish stories without any knowledge of html.

Q. Overall, how much of Dwell's online content is exclusive to that platform, rather than adapted from the print magazine? Might that change down the road?

A. dwell.com has allowed us to provide our community with new content, in all forms: video, which is coming soon; podcasts; a blog; and newsletters. At the moment, the magazine content has allowed us to have great depth of articles on dwell.com. We’re able to present these archived articles in a new way—allowing the user to visually sort by subject area. We call it the Visual Brows. Over the next year, dwell.com will feature exciting online-only content in the form of video, podcasts, blogs and online feature stories.

Q. Do you anticipate video playing a bigger role in the near future? Perhaps including virtual tours a la real estate sites?

A. Right now, we’re working on a really exciting video project, which documents a couple’s home renovation in New York City's Harlem. The couple was inspired to build in Harlem, based on a Dwell magazine article. This series, “Going Green in Harlem,” launches February 21, and its 10 episodes will follow them through the challenging and rewarding process. Some of our videos will complement Dwell magazine’s stories, e.g. a travel story, an architect profile, a home tour, while others will feature brand-new subject matter.

Q. What about audio? Might future uses include podcasts, etc., from your own conferences?

A. The Dwell Podcast series is another new development for us. Launching in February, this series will feature subjects such as “Going Solar” and “The Glass House,” produced by our Los Angeles Editor, Frances Anderton. We do have audio sessions available from our conferences at www.dwell.com/audio and on iTunes.

Q. Your next relaunch is coming in mid-February. How will that differ from the one in mid-2006?

A. We're set to launch video and podcasts, and we wanted our homepage to highlight our new content, so we decided to redesign the homepage. As you’ll soon see, the new design for the homepage of dwell.com surfaces more content and is easier to navigate—all an effort to allow our users to get what they’re looking for, and more, quickly.

Q. Looking beyond, are there things you'd like to be doing that you're not yet doing?
A. We want to explore the integration of user-generated content on our site. Right now, users can submit their “before” and “after” photos to “Modern My Way,” and we’d like to expand that area of the site. In the future, we’d also like to allow our active community members to submit video (e.g. architectural films, tours of their homes, etc.) to inspire other users. Our new online community Dwell Connect has brought many of our users together, and it’s been fun to watch the user groups solve problems and engage with each other. In the coming months, we hope to offer this community special offers and regional invitations