Speaking.com

A speakers bureau gets a data overhaul and new website that optimizes search

The Context and Challenge

Speaking.com, the web’s first speaking bureau in business since 1994, needed a redesign of its brand presentation and website. With over 1200 celebrity and high-profile speakers profiles, hundreds of social media feeds, thousands of videos, and hundreds of blog posts, this content needed to also be reorganized, searchable, and public-ratable, while making it easy for potential clients and organizations to book speakers, understand the process of booking speakers and what it takes to have successful speaking events, and raise the profile of both speakers and the bureau itself.

The Process and Insight

We began first with a brand refresh and styling, designing a new identity with new fonts, new colors, and an adaptation / refresh of the business logo. We also sourced images in line with the polished presentation needed for this site.

With new branding in place we set about redesigning the speaker profiles first. With 60+ content fields, they contain everything from speaking videos, social media feeds, information about books, interviews with speakers exclusive to speaking.com, and more. Significant custom coding was needed to integrate all these forms of content neatly into single pages. From there we developed content pages, category pages, search functionality, blog pages, and the linkages between them to have rich feature contents across page types.

Managing legacy content can be truly challenging, especially when content has accrued over 25 years of business and 10+ years of thousands of profiles built in WordPress. We helped the client with significant data reorganization, cleanup, and verification of links and videos – an 80 hour project in itself. We then set up a new structure for the information with custom searches across content; custom sorting by ratings, price, speaker topic, location, and more; a rating system where people who’d seen speakers speak could rate their experience; a series of forms for booking, rating, and otherwise managing client and speaker experiences; built out the blog into a modern format; replaced and refreshed many stock images; implemented a number of quite complex custom code features; and improved data structure and content for maximum SEO results.

The Results

In addition to Restructuring the data and html for optimal SEO results has increased many speaker profile ratings in google and for the site overall. A refreshed and modernized design has enabled the client to compete more stridently with others in the space. Said the client, “Thank you again for helping create an amazing new SPEAKING.com website… you have been awesome.”