- Details
- Category: Work
- Published:
- Hits: 33
Sometimes the best way to test a website is to stop looking at how it was built and simply use it.
That was the starting point for the OTMN Publishing Experience Audit.
We had a basic question:
Could the existing OTMN website become a credible publishing destination without rebuilding the publishing system?
The answer turned out to be more interesting than a simple yes or no.
The Question
OTMN has been evolving quickly.
Over the past several weeks, the website has gone through changes to its services, navigation, content, and overall structure. At the same time, we've been thinking about how OTMN can show people not just what we are, but what we're actually doing.
That raised a question.
If someone discovers OTMN through LinkedIn or somewhere else, can they come to the website and understand that there is an active body of work behind the organization?
We didn't want to assume the answer.
So we tested the site.
The Experiment
Instead of starting with the Joomla backend, we looked at the site the way a visitor would.
We recorded ourselves navigating the public OTMN website, moving through the homepage, navigation, content categories, individual articles, service material, and other major areas of the site.
The goal wasn't to conduct a technical Joomla audit.
It was to answer a simpler question:
What does OTMN actually feel like when someone tries to find and follow its work?
That distinction turned out to matter.
What We Found
The first surprise was that there was already a lot there.
The OTMN homepage establishes a recognizable identity around:
Connecting Ideas. Building Communities.
It also connects the organization with its founder, Mark W. Bender, and introduces ideas about community, participation, technology, and the broader purpose of OTMN.
The site also has a functioning identity layer beyond the homepage.
The OTMN Manifesto explains why the organization exists and what it believes.
Build The Network explains that OTMN is intended to be more than a website.
And the OTMN Cookie Jar provides a place for ideas that aren't necessarily ready to become finished work.
Those pieces matter because they give visitors different ways to understand OTMN.
But the biggest discovery was the publishing system itself.
The Publishing System Was Already There
The site already contained categories, article listings, and individual article pages.
We could move through areas such as The Journey and Technology Changes, see collections of content, and open individual articles.
There was also a substantial amount of service-oriented content.
Examples included:
- The Future Starts Here
- Why You Can Participate
- How We Think About Ideas & Work
- Look Before You Build
- When Technology Is the Right Place
- Creative Work Has a Purpose
- Let's Create Something That Works
- Some Problems Need More Than a Quick Answer
- When Get Started Is the Right Place
- Make What You Already Have Work Better
- Spend Less Time on Repetitive Work
In other words, OTMN didn't need to invent a publishing capability.
It already had one.
That changed the question.
The Problem Wasn't Publishing
The more we looked at the visitor experience, the more the problem appeared to be one of framing and discoverability.
The work existed.
The articles existed.
The categories existed.
The organization had a story.
But the current structure didn't necessarily make one thing obvious to a new visitor:
What is OTMN working on right now?
That's a different problem from not having a publishing system.
And it's a much smaller problem.
What Worked
Several parts of the existing system were already doing their jobs.
The homepage works as an identity layer
A visitor can understand that OTMN is trying to connect ideas and build communities.
The Founder connection exists
Mark W. Bender is already part of the public OTMN story.
The Manifesto works as a philosophy layer
Visitors can learn why OTMN exists and what it believes.
The publishing system works
Categories, article listings, and individual article pages are already usable destinations.
The site contains real breadth
The walkthrough moved through a surprisingly broad collection of published material.
OTMN already supports experimentation
The Cookie Jar is one example of an intentionally less-conventional content concept.
None of this means the site is finished.
It means we have something worth improving.
What Didn't Work as Well
The weakness wasn't that the site couldn't publish.
The weakness was that the current work wasn't yet presented as a clearly identifiable body of OTMN work.
A conventional Blog structure can tell someone:
"Here are our articles."
But OTMN is trying to communicate something slightly different:
"Here is what we're researching, building, experimenting with, and learning."
That distinction led to the next decision.
Reuse Instead of Rebuild
The obvious temptation would have been to create an entirely new publishing architecture.
We decided that would be premature.
The experiment showed that the existing system already provided much of what we needed.
So the direction became:
Reuse → Reconfigure → Create → Improve
Rather than replacing the publishing system, we could make targeted changes around it.
That led to the development of a clearer WORK area.
What Changed Next
The PEA walkthrough itself did not show the subsequent Joomla implementation work.
That work happened afterward.
Based on what we learned, OTMN established WORK as a distinct public content area, initially organized around:
- Research
- Builds
- Experiments
WORK-specific presentation and category functionality were also developed and tested.
Public URLs became part of the publishing QA process as well.
These are subsequent implementation decisions, not things we are claiming the original recording directly showed.
That distinction is important.
The experiment gave us the direction.
The implementation followed.
The Bigger Lesson
The most useful lesson from the audit wasn't about Joomla.
It was about evaluating publishing systems.
A publishing system can successfully create an article.
That doesn't necessarily mean it creates a good publishing experience.
Those are two different things.
A backend can say:
Published.
A visitor might still experience:
Where am I? What is this? What's new? What should I look at next?
So we're adopting a simple principle:
Don't evaluate a publishing system solely by whether it can publish. Evaluate what a real visitor experiences after something is published.
That's the idea behind the Publishing Experience Audit.
What We Still Don't Know
The experiment answered some questions, but it also created better ones.
We still need to determine:
- Is WORK actually clearer than the previous Blog-oriented experience?
- Does Research / Builds / Experiments remain useful as the site grows?
- How much homepage modification is really necessary?
- Can a new visitor quickly understand what OTMN is working on?
- Does the LinkedIn → OTMN → WORK journey make sense?
- Can the publishing experience be tested repeatedly rather than just once?
Most importantly:
Does WORK make OTMN's current work easier to see, understand, and follow?
That's the next experiment.
The Next Test
This article is part of that test.
We're going to publish the actual work on OTMN first, verify the visitor experience, and then decide whether and how to distribute it elsewhere.
For now, LinkedIn is the obvious candidate.
But we're not assuming that every article should automatically become a social post.
We'll test that too.
The goal is to establish a simple publishing loop:
Create → Publish → Verify → Distribution Decision → Measure → Learn
And then do it again.
Because ultimately, the Publishing Experience Audit isn't really about Joomla.
It's about whether OTMN can build a system where the work becomes visible, discoverable, and useful to the people we're trying to reach.
And the only way to find out is to keep testing.
Next Question
Can WORK become the obvious public evidence layer for OTMN?
We're about to find out.
#OTMN #Publishing #Experiments #BuildInPublic #Website