User Experience

Dec 16
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How fast is your website?

Posted by | User Experience, Website Development | No Comments

How quickly does your website load? Are you running a website that has a lot of images or a lot of javascript? If you notice your website taking longer than 5 seconds to load,  you might want to consider looking into alternative solutions to improve site speed. You may not think it’s an import feature of your website, but if you were to poll all new website visitors, you would find they tend to disagree. Waiting for a website to load is one of my biggest frustrations, and with just a little optimization your website can be drastically improved.

If you are not sure how quickly your website loads, or you would like to learn how to test this before outsourcing your project to a website designer/developer, try using Pingdom. Pingdom is a great solution to either doing a one-time test of your websites performance, or to continually run site monitoring. Take a few minutes and test your website using their “Site performance” tool, and you will know within a few minutes if your website is loading at a reasonable rate or not.

Always keep these type of performance metrics top of mind, because all it takes is one bad experience on your website for someone not to come back.

Aug 10
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20 Social media icons vs. 5 Social Icons

Posted by | Social Media, User Experience | No Comments

Have you recently started using social media to promote you website content? Find that none of the quick social applications like sharethis are working as effectively as hoped? The thought was to show as many icons as possible.

Like many beginners that are very new to the concept of SEO/Social Media you may have added all the social icons you could to the bottom of your website content. There is some reasoning behind only having a select few icons that promote your content and that is to only show those social avenues that you plan to maintain profiles on and or are getting the most of each post.

When you offer a visitor to much to choose from they don’t choose anything. If your able to narrow it down to where your content is getting the most volume from and which avenue is the most profitable for your site in the long run you will notice your getting the most from your web content.

Examples:

  1.  Personal blog: twitter, facebook, digg, and friendfeed.
  2.  Corporate: twitter, linkedin, del.icio.us, directory (industry related)

Conclusion: identify your website short term and long term goals, and decide which social media avenue will help the most.

 

Jul 15
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Top 5 places people don’t look in Google Analytics

Posted by | Analytics, User Experience, Web Design | No Comments

Do you currently use the Free Tool Google offers called “Google Analytics“? If you are and wonder if there is information you might be missing out on because you don’t have enough experience using it your probably correct.

There are many key areas to look at on a daily basis using the free tool like how many site visitors, top content pages, geographic locations, keywords, etc.

Here is the top 5 areas that don’t get enough attention using Google analytics.

1. Absolute Unique Visitors – This area will show you the exact number of new (non-returning) visitors to your site so you can see when they are coming (day of the week and times) and the overall number of hits your getting.

area 1 Top 5 places people dont look in Google Analytics

2. Length of Visit – Great piece of information for any website optimizer trying to see if the content is being read, call to actions are processing traffic, and if the design is keeping people on your site.

area 2 Top 5 places people dont look in Google Analytics

3. Browsers – With this information you can justify designing (spending extra for cross browser designs) taking the time to design your site for all browsers.

area 3 Top 5 places people dont look in Google Analytics

4. Referring Sites – When you are able to see the exact sites sending you traffic you can decide if your social media is performing, referral programs are generating traffic, and if their is a large amount of external communication about your site.

area 4 Top 5 places people dont look in Google Analytics

5. Top Exit Pages – Ever wonder which page on your site isn’t performing? With the information this section offers you can focus on the portions of your site that are failing. Take this information to your web designer/marketing team and ask why visitors aren’t staying on this page.

area 5 Top 5 places people dont look in Google Analytics

Hope this list helps you in improving your web experience and design.

Apr 16
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5 great examples of 30-Day trials

Posted by | User Experience | No Comments

Some software websites are a little hesitant when it comes to offering their products for “Free”. The most popular solution for this concern is offer it for a“30 day trial”.

The key benefits to this are; obtaining that lead, ability to test and submit accurate feedback, and if your product is as good as you say it is there will be no issue when its time to pay.

Here are 5 great examples of strong “call-to-actions” to offer a “30 Day Trial”:

free trail1 5 great examples of 30 Day trials

 

free trail2 5 great examples of 30 Day trials

 

free trail3 5 great examples of 30 Day trials

 

free trail4 5 great examples of 30 Day trials

 

free trail5 5 great examples of 30 Day trials

 

Take the concepts from these examples and implement them into your website. Like all call-to-actions set a timer on them and review your results.

Apr 14
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Great example of an Error page

Posted by | User Experience, Website Development | No Comments

Having an error page can be a great marketing tool when your site decides to crash. Many website fail to forget about this small but large page on a website. Having this page can make the decision making process even easier for the website visitor. If they only have 1 or 2 options from this error page they can be converted much easier.

Here is a great example of a simple but useful error page that major networking website “Linkedin” uses:

error msg1 Great example of an Error page

Take this example as a guide line for your own Error page and add your own branding on it. Try using some creative images to entice your website visitors. Choose your best “call-to-action” and make it clear what you want to get from your visitors and what they will get from you.

Apr 08
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How to COMBAT Spam

Posted by | User Experience, Website Development | No Comments

As website owners we are fully aware of the amount of spam/bots come through a website in a day/week/month/year. How do you currently deal with is? Sort through all the spam form submissions, face comments, and blog posts? Or do you restrict the functionality of your site? If you decide that maintain comments on a blog is to timely due to the amount of spam you could be really missing out on the SEO benefits.

What are your options moving forward? There are a number of things you can do that don’t require a large amount of maintenance;

  • limit blog comments to registered users
  • have all comments go through a automatic filtering process
  • add captcha to all of your forms so that they have to be human to get the correct answer to submit the form (examples: http://www.96robots.com/contact and http://www.96robots.com/ask_us)
  • only allow plain txt submissions

captcha How to COMBAT Spam

 

This is only a short version of a very large list of tips to combat your websites spam intake. Implement these suggestions to reduce management time/costs so you can focus on the real issues.

Apr 06
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Is your Shopping Cart Performing as much as you hoped?

Posted by | User Experience | No Comments

A major topic that most Ecom sites face is “how well does our shopping cart convert?”. Many Ecom solutions are not offering the functionality that most online shoppers are looking for and decide to shop else where.

A few things you can do is check your Google Analytics information for a better idea of where during the checkout process you are losing the majority of your customers. You could always ask your customers once they have purchased why they completed the transaction online or if they have ever left in the middle and why?. Another good method would be to have a online survey which will give you honest answers and at the same time create conversation among web visitors.

Here are just a few good tips to help improve your current Shopping cart:

  • One – show product thumbnails in your shopping cart so you can remind your customers visually what they are purchasing.
  • Two – always show the related items or “featured products” under or around the shopping cart. Add-ons can be much more profitable then many business realize.
  • Three – make it visible that you have a secure ecom business so users that are not familiar with online shopping can see they wont be defrauded. We have to realize even though we all now so much about online browsing and shopping most of the population are in the “baby boom” generation so knowledge levels are lower for most customers using your shopping cart.
  • Four – having the ability to do “live chat” while shopping has always always been a great tool so you can confirm your shopping cart items right on the spot as opposed to sending an email or calling a long waited customer service agent. When you have to leave a site or wait for your items you just lost your customer.
  • Five – wish list is a great tool to learn more about your customer and what they are looking for so you can target your marketing efforts accordingly.

For more information or tips on how to convert your customers please contact me.

Apr 04
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Call-to-action: volume 2

Posted by | Online Marketing, User Experience | No Comments

Thought it was time to revisit our “call-to-action” (CTA) suggestions, tips, and standards. The topic of this blog will be “how not to design or execute a CTA”. As I have seen many times while browsing various websites there seems to be a constant miss understanding of what a “call-to-action” is. CTA’s are used to convert a visitor or cold lead into a warm lead or even better a customer.

Here are 5 things not to do when using Call-to-actions:

  • Number one - this could be the most important tip I can give is to “not over complicate your message”. So easy to do but if you want your conversion rates higher keep it simple. Rule of thumb is make your message as if a 5yr was reading it.
  • Number two – get to the point so it only takes 2 to 3 seconds to understand what your offering and how they can get it.
  • Number three – don’t just place your CTA without doing your research. Learn where on your site gives you the highest conversion rates and optimize this location for your key marketing realistate.
  • Number four – print and web are not the same so don’t treat them like they are. Often web CTA’s are designed the same as print which will not work because visits like magazine readers will not take their time to go over your site. You have under 20 seconds to capture a web visitors attention.
  • Number five – although not a major mistake but still important not to do is forget about your call to action. Don’t for get that all good “call-to-actions” have a timer so you can get your visitors to act quickly on your offer.

If you are able to successfully “not” do these things you will see great results in your marketing call-to-actions.

Nov 06
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Learn how to test what “Call-to-Actions” work

Posted by | User Experience | No Comments

Are you testing your online marketing strategies every 30 days? If not, why? Let’s think for a second and come up with a few good ideas of how to test a website “call-to-action”.

  1. We could put a fancy button on our site located in the left nav bar offering some great value to your visitors. After 30 days we see how many leads this provided us with then try another location like the main body to see if your visitors are more likely to click on something in certain website areas.
  2. Try to offer different promotions or even just switching up the wording like these.

 

If nothing is seeming to work then go back to the drawing board to come up with your website’s “Value Proposition” and put it into words that will attract your customers.

 

 

Feel free to ask me anything, anytime! Contact Me