Revamping the best online career and continuing education resource for nursing professionals.

For more than 30 years, Nurse.com has been the most trusted source for nursing jobs, education, compelling news and other resources that actively support the educational and career aspirations of nurses at every level of training and experience.

Nurse.com evolved from a print trade publication launched in the mid-1980s by the Gannett Healthcare Group. The publication moved online in the early 2000s and continues to provide continuing education, career fairs, and news and job opportunities for nurses. It also continues to publish a print magazine. In 2015, Gannett sold the business to OnCourse Learning.

We were introduced to Nurse.com by the CMO of a former client (ShopperTrak) who had moved into a new role with OnCourse and referred us to the new owners’ leadership team.

Coming into focus.

Nurse.com’s new owners wanted a comprehensive digital strategy for a redesigned website that would feature new product offerings and support a restructured revenue model. Up to that point, its online continuing education courses were offered a la carte and at a low cost, which a majority of its users took as “one-offs.”

Switching to an affordable, annual subscription-based service, its leadership determined, would encourage frequency, build a repeat customer base and generate a more sustainable revenue stream. They would also offer advertiser-sponsored courses nurses could take for free.

But beyond these plans, the leadership team was unsure how to redesign and build a website that would provide an exceptional user experience and unlock its full potential. That’s where we came in to help.

Lead with research.

To do so, we dug deep with the leadership team to understand how their business models worked. We learned that Nurse.com elicited revenues from three primary sources: job listings from hospitals; continuing education; and advertising. Next, we looked at the website analytics for insights into how users were engaging with the site. We quickly found a wide spectrum of users who weren’t regular “students” in its continuing education courses. Through our research, we learned that the average nurse takes three courses a year (like many healthcare professionals, nurses are required to take continuing education courses to maintain their credentials and skills). Yet many of their users were only taking courses on an as-needed basis, and not returning.

To learn more about Nurse.com’s audience, we surveyed a sample of the more than one million nurses in the company’s database to learn more about their needs and their likes and dislikes about the existing site. While users appreciated the ability to take courses online, information was hard to find, buried within interior pages. The homepage was a jumble of text, reflecting the silos within the organization where every department competed for space and making it difficult to navigate.

Our research-driven findings were crucial to informing the redesign of the site that would prioritize the website’s original intent as a one-stop, go-to resource. And our strategic counsel paid off.

Lessons learned.

Launch and refine. A great new design and navigation are essential. So is employing tactics to make sure your website can be found in search. SEO should be baked into the process.

Refresh content often. In migrating old content to a new site, removing what’s obsolete, is only a half measure. Creating new content is essential to attracting and retaining users. Don’t cut corners and shortchange content!