UserTesting has a panel of mobile device users who have high-resolution webcams on stands. So you can watch them use their mobile device–iPhone, Android, or iPad–as they visit your mobile website or use your mobile app.

The good folks at UT, amongst them Dave Garr love SEO ROI (who doesn’t? , and are donating 100 free mobile tests to SEO ROI’s readers. To get your free test:

1. Go to http://www.usertesting.com/mobile
2. Click “Pricing & Sign Up”
3. Select “1 user” from the dropdown menu.
4. When you get to the second page, click the “gift code” link and enter: seoroi

Voila, magic!

Hope you enjoy trying out their service !

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Clients or leads with bad websites often acknowledge the problem but say that they’re redesigning anyways, so why implement conversion rate optimization work now when it will only last until the redesign?

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Here’s a secret. That redesign? It’s coming, sure… it’ll be here around the time we achieve world peace. Or maybe a few days later, because the designer – unlike world peace – needs coffee breaks.

The reality is that web redesign projects are virtually never delivered on time. They suffer from many causes of delay, some of which include:

• while-we’re-at-it-itis: the propensity to toss in everything but the kitchen sink in the redesign, since all those extra features will each just take a few minutes to do and certainly won’t need to be tested for bugs
• budget shortfall: big briefs and little budgets make websites sad
• we-didn’t-really-know-what-we-got-ourselves-into-itis: the desire to close the deal commonly leads programmers, web shops and others to promise the world without understanding the true scope of the work. Sure we can duplicate Amazon.com for ya!
• HIPPOs: HIPPO stands for Highest Paid Person’s Opinion and it’s one of the biggest time wasters and argument generators. These people often “know best” – after all, they started the business in 1999 so they’re still the expert in 2012.
• Design by committee: Having to please everyone not only creates aweful sites, but it also takes longer
• Knowledge-enough-to-be-dangerous-participants: They read some articles and sold their services to consult on the project, and now they’re trying to justify their fees. Problem is… those fees can’t be justified. But you’ll have to handhold them and teach them stuff from scratch and want to blow your brains out 10 times along the way.

So that redesign that’s 2 months away from launch? Double that.

What about the cost of lost revenue?

Calculate the revenue you’re losing per month. A 15% conversion rate lift is easily achieved, so if you’re doing say 100 conversions a month, you’re losing 15 conversions in your first month delay!

Q: If your new site goes live in 4 months, does that mean you’re losing 60 (4 months x 15 conversions) conversions in that time?
A: No, you’re actually losing more!

- You’re losing the repeat sales from those people, regardless of whether those sales would come in the next 4 months or not.
- You’re losing the added conversions of further rounds of testing. It goes without saying that in 4 months, you can run multiple tests. And that means compounding interest.

Without even counting repeat sales, from conversion rate optimization alone you would get an extra 99 conversions! That’s like you just made your year 1 month longer! Who said there were only 24 hours in a day?

If you liked this post, get my latest posts by email or by RSS.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Want to learn usability testing? I promise that any complete beginner who applies the lessons in this guide thoroughly will see a higher conversion rate in 30 days, guaranteed!

Q: What is usability testing? What is remote usability testing?

A: Usability testing is the process of having people interact with a website and provide feedback on it. The purpose of this testing is to find out why users are using the site as they are.

The value in understanding why users behave a certain way is that you get actionable insight, which raw data on what users are doing doesn’t tell you. You can see what’s tripping up users and fix it!

Note: Usability testing is also used offline for testing products, but for our purposes we’ll stick to website usability testing.

Remote usability testing is a method of usability testing where the users testing the website are in a different location than the person giving the test. The test giver, known as the moderator, sets up the test and provides instructions on what to do.

For now, let’s see how usability testing works. Later we’ll address specific issues like remote vs in-person usability testing, moderated vs unmoderated testing, and what tools to use for specific tasks.

How Usability Testing Works

Photo credit sxc

There are 5 steps to running a usability test.

1. First, you decides on tasks you want people to do on your website, such as search for a product and add to cart.

2. You recruit users, ideally ones representative of the site’s audience for the test. Typically, 3-5 testers are used in each round of testing, after which changes are made and another round of testing begins.

(If you can’t recruit users, there are companies who do that and usability testing tools with panels of users you can recruit.)

3. Users attempt to do the tasks set by the site owner.

In the most popular and effective form of usability testing, test-takers record their screen and voice, while sharing their thoughts out loud as they use the site. In other types of usability testing, feedback may only be written afterwards.

A short questionnaire typically follows screen-and-audio-recording type tests. Questions focus on problems encountered using the site, possible solutions, and how the tester would have behaved had it not been a test.

4. You review the user feedback to understand what the users were trying to do and why. Make note of the most common difficulties.

5. The site owner makes changes to the website to solve the problems discovered from the recordings.

Note: For ease of reference, I’m going to use “the moderator,” “site owner” and “you” interchangeably, but the roles can be shared between team members as you see fit.

Let’s see each step of the testing process in more depth.

Step 1: Deciding On And Writing Tasks For Users

The first step is figuring out and writing what you want your users to try to do. You need to describe outcomes for users to achieve, and avoid (to the extent possible) being too explicit in how to do a task, avoid mentioning the names of particular links to click (e.g. the task reads “learn pricing,” when the site has a “Pricing” link).

A good task description is, “Get in touch with us,” not “Click ‘contact’ and fill out the form.”

Photo credit sxc

Start by asking, what is the purpose of the site? Then work backwards and ask yourself what steps are needed to get a visitor to accomplish those steps.

The following example illustrates how this works at a coarse level, but you can go more granular and test sub-elements within each step.

Ecommerce example: Let’s imagine we’re usability testing a running shoe retailer.

6 – Purpose of the site: The site’s purpose is to sell running shoes.

5- Previous step: To sell merchandise, users need to checkout.

4 – Previous step: To checkout, they need to have added something to cart.

3 – Previous step: To have added something to cart, they need to have found a product that adequately meets their needs.

2 – Previous step: To find that product, the users must sort through the site’s products easily.

1 – First step: Before sorting, visitors need to be convinced not to bounce with a credible appearance that’s relevant to their intent in visiting.

For step 1, since users are coming to your site to do the test, they won’t bounce on their own. To find out if your site is credible and relevant, use a five second test task description:

Ask people to look at the page for five seconds, look away, then share what they remember. Does “what people remember” match the landing page’s traffic sources, such as search keywords and ad copy? Is the design credible or does it make people flee?

For steps 2-6, a regular usability test with screen and voice recording would work fine.

Task description

Good: “Find a pair of Reebok running shoes and buy them. Find answers to any questions that come to mind.” This leaves discretion to users to browse for Reebok running shoes the way they naturally would. This allows them the choice to browse with search or clicks, refine their options as usual… in sum, to be themselves, which is what we want to see.

Bad: “Click the Reebok running shoes button in the lower left sidebar, click on a pair of shoes, add them to cart, and fill out the checkout forms.”

Step 2: Recruiting Users

(image credit Vintage Military Ads)

This is where most web pros aspiring to run usability tests give up. Frankly, recruiting testers is hard.

First, it’s not always obvious who your audience is. Who are these “representative users” anyways?

To answer that, build personas (easier), and seek keyword-level demographics (harder). If you’ve never worked in the field, you can always email the owners of existing sites and ask them; if they’re competitors, look at
people offering the service in a different city or language.

Second, how do you go about soliciting people to test the site? Why would they care or bother? Where do you find them? How do you approach them?

Commonly, usability testing will pay testers for their time. With remote usability testing, paypal payments or online gift certificates (ex.: Amazon.com) are common. Others are interested in helping just to be helpful or because they’re friends.

Once you know who your representative users are, you need to find them. To do that, first try the free way and solicit amongst family, friends and contacts by email and phone.

After exhausting this pool or if your contacts just are too different from representative users (you’re starting a hispanic dating site without knowing anyone hispanic), you can run demographically or professionally targeted ads. Places to advertise include Facebook, PlentyOfFish, LinkedIn, MyAds (demographics powered by MySpace) and supposedly the Google Display Network (formerly the Content Network).

Another option that recruits directly from your users is Bolt|Peters‘ Ethnio recruiting service.

Originally, Ethnio was offered at a rate of a few hundred dollars per person because it was an offline, labour-intensive recruiting process. Today Ethnio is a software tool with a free trial that just requires you to copy-paste some code to get started. It intercepts visitors as they come to the site, asking them to participate in your test. The downside is that the test needs to consist of a survey or Usabilla click test, which helps but isn’t as useful as getting them to record their screen and voice.

Another easy way out of recruiting is buy a remote usability testing service with a panel of users.

Tools in this category that will have users record their screen and spoken thoughts include TryMyUI , UserFeel -whose panel includes testers in the UK and Greece- and UserTesting.com. (UI means User Interface, such as the part of the website customers interact with by clicking and typing.)

On a lower-tech level there is Feedback Army, which surveys visitors after they try using your site. While it doesn’t record audio or video, it’s also only $15 for 10 users to provide their feedback.

Note that these panels are only appropriate for sites geared towards a general audience. Sites requiring knowledge of particular jargon (e.g. SEO) won’t find representative users here, since user selection criteria are limited to demographics and tech-savvy (“technographics”), and don’t break down by vertical.

A word on “representative users”

Finally, while it’s ideal to get representative users, it’s also fine to get users who are less representative and grade on a curve, proportionately to how closely they match your audience. (Hattip Steve Krug)

Step 3: Running the Test

Once recruited, it’s up to users to follow instructions and do the test. This either happens at agreed-upon times (moderated testing), or at the user’s discretion (unmoderated usability testing).

Test Preparation

With moderated testing, the moderator either sets up a computer with screen and audio recording software before the test, or instructs users to use browser-based software to record their screens and voices.

With unmoderated testing, the user is responsible for ensuring the audio and video recording software is on and recording, at the right level.

Note: Both of these comments assume a regular usability test, as opposed to a limited or partial test aimed at discovering how users interact with particular aspects of the site. This includes mouse-movement tracking and click measurement tests, for example, as well as visual analysis tools like FiveSecondTest or predictive gazeplot-and-eye-tracking tool Feng-Gui.

A gazeplot generated on Amazon’s mobile homepage by Feng-Gui.

Tip: It’s important to make sure that both video and audio are recording at the start, and that the sound levels are high enough, to avoid wasting time and money.

What Your Instructions  Need To Cover

Once the audio and video are on and at the right level, there are three things your instructions must cover:

a. Asking the user to say what hes doing and why out loud, constantly. To quote TryMyUI:

“Clearly say exactly what you are thinking as you are thinking it. We are interested in your impressions, expectations, and the motivations for your actions. Don’t edit your thoughts as you navigate the website! Simply say exactly what you are thinking at each step.”

Steve Krug’s excellent book on usability testing, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, emphasizes that you should make clear it’s the website being tested, not the user. They can’t make mistakes here!

This serves the highly important purpose of preventing self-censorship, as alluded to in TryMyUI’s instructions.

b. Providing a starting URL for the user. With in-person testing, you’ll have this pre-loaded.

c. Provide a written list of tasks. Don’t just provide it orally, because you want to ensure the same phrasing each time.

If users get distracted and go off to do their own thing, the moderator gently encourages them back to the task at hand.

Step 4: Reviewing The Feedback

Once the tests have been run, what’s left is data – not actionable insight. To turn that information into actionable recommendations, the moderator needs to review the collected feedback.

His purpose is to look for patterns in what gave users difficulty.

By focusing on problems common to more than one user, you ensure that you get the most bang for your buck in making changes and fixing the site. This is also why running a test with one user is insufficient.

Conversely, to save time and money, you shouldn’t test with more than 5 users per round of testing. By the fourth or fifth user you’ll already know the main issues the site has and having the same problems highlighted another half dozen times isn’t productive.

The problems the moderator will discover can usually be categorized by WiderFunnel’s classic LIFT model of conversion optimization:

• Value Proposition: What’s in it for the user. This is the core which the other factors act upon.
• Anxiety: How design -security reassurances, layout- and content -answering questions, social proof- affect trustworthiness. Reduce anxiety to lift the conversion plane.

• Distraction: The page features too many eye-catching elements. Focus is drawn away from the page’s main purpose. Reduce distraction for more lift.

• Relevance: The degree to which the page matches users’ expectations before arriving. Increase relevance for more lift.

• Clarity: Do the design and content work in synergy to explain the value proposition?

• Urgency: Do users have a reason to act now?

To return to our earlier example of the online running shoe retailer, here are some things you would look for in your analysis.

First, as mentioned earlier, is the landing page’s credibility and relevance to traffic sources. Is the site secure? Is the graphic design professional? For relevance, you can show the traffic source (ad, link or search listing) briefly before taking users to the landing page. Within the five second test, you can ask if the landing page matches the expectations the traffic source created.  – Relevance, Anxiety, Clarity -

Visitors need to drill down and find a product that suits their needs. Can they browse and search their way through your categories to find an adequate fit? How effective are your refinement options? When clicking through to a subcategory or product detail page, does the content there match expectations? – Relevance, Clarity -

Third, visitors need to get sufficient information from the product detail page. Does the information answer visitors’ questions? Does it convey benefits? How scannable is the information – bullet points or paragraphs? Where’s the refunds policy? Are the shoes in stock? How much is shipping? – Value Proposition, Urgency, Anxiety-

Users also need to be able to add to cart easily, and then modify the contents of the cart. Is the add to cart button noticeable and clearly a button? Are the cart buttons clearly labelled and laid out in a hierarchy reflecting their importance? Does the site need all this information the checkout requests? – Clarity, Distraction, Urgency, Anxiety -

Step 5: Implement The Changes

Again, follow Steve Krug’s excellent advice: Change the least possible to solve the problems.

For example, instead of redesigning a page’s graphics to reduce distraction, comment out some of the graphics. Test again and see if that solves things. To save time on such visual makeovers, you can just use a visual testing tool like Feng-Gui or Five Second Test, mentioned earlier.

And don’t wait for the “upcoming redesign”… 99% of the time it’ll go live months after promised. In the meantime, you’ve wasted loads of traffic.

Miscellaneous Testing Tips and FAQ

How do I test…

… information architecture (aka the organization of content on a site into logical groups)? Use card sorting. Do users look for content where you expected? Do they click the right links to drill down to the content you want them to find? (Image credit Revium.)

… where people would click next? Look at click based tools like CrazyEgg or Usabilla.

… how people make their way through a model of the site? Try wireframe creation software that (i) lets you interact with the wireframe by clicking the navigation and going to the wireframes for the relevant pages and (ii) allows you to share your wireframes online, so testers can access them. Some wireframe tools are designed to only be used in a desktop environment, so read carefully to avoid that.

See

Remote Testing vs In-Person Testing Pros and Cons

Remote testing is

- Cheaper: Don’t need to pay for travel, premises, computer equipment, food
- Less work to organize
- Easier to recruit for because there’s no geographic restriction
- Commonly paid for via Paypal or gift certificates

In-Person testing is

- More personal, you can get body language
- A more compelling opportunity for the whole team to witness the testing simultaneously and debrief, which can get things moving faster
- Commonly paid for in cash
- Instantaneous feedback; you view the data as it comes in, instead of waiting until later

“Moderated Testing” vs “Unmoderated Testing” Pros and Cons

Moderated testing:

- Is significantly less likely to encounter errors requiring retakes, such as setup issues with hardware or software, or testers veering off topic
- Yields richer, more useful data
- Tends to have representative users

Unmoderated testing:

- Sometimes yields obnoxious or useless responses, like FiveSecondTest and Feedback Army testers more interested in accumulating credits or micropayments than being helpful.
- Costs less on an individual test basis, because there is no moderator, or because it typically involves testing narrow interaction aspects such as click tests or visual feedback
- Is commonly associated with narrow aspects of interaction
- Tests of particular aspects may or may not have representative users
- Can save time when run through a service with a panel of testers, such that recruitment effort is negligible. This advantage makes it an easy entry-point/stepping stone for beginners to enter the world of usability testing.

Additional testing tools references:

There are many tools available for usability testing specific aspects of a website, or the whole shebang.

Kyle Soucy of Usable Interface put together a helpful, comprehensive overview of these varied tools.

Concluding Tip: Start as early in the web design process as possible

- Talk about the idea with friends and family and see what are the most common questions/objections raised, so you can answer them.

- Create user interface mockups in Photoshop and do the 5 second test (with or without the site): namely, ask people to look for a few seconds, then look away and ask what they recall.

- Put early design mockups through Feng-GUI as a sanity check – are there too many visually ‘loud’ areas?

- Imperfect testing is better than none. As the French say, “the best is the enemy of the good [enough].”

Further reading:

Sensible – Steve Krug’s site
Usability Post
RemoteUsability.com/tools

http://okcancel.com/archives/article/2006/07/guide-to-remote-usability-testing.html

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/remote_online_usability_testing_why_how_and_when_to_use_it

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Mobile websites’ homepages beat the pants off regular websites’ homepage designs at achieving a homepage’s goal: driving the visitor deeper into the site.

Q: Why are the homepage designs of mobile sites so much more effective than the design of ordinary homepages?

A: The reduced space on mobile screens forces choices in what to display, and this is especially true on the homepage.

Look at Amazon’s regular design:

The design of Amazon's full size homepage suffers from clutter. The extra screen space available has lead to a unfocused homepage design - and this despite generous whitespace.

The gaze plot for Amazon's home page shows that visitors' eyes will likely bounce all over the page, not focusing on a single spot.

As with the gaze plot, the heatmap indicates several very strong points of focus on the page, increasing the bounce rate and decreasing conversions.

Look at how the gaze plot and heatmap from Feng-Gui (that’s predictive eye-tracking; check out my friends at MiraMetrix.com for actual eye-tracking equipment) shows the human eye having too many focus spots on the regular home page … and this is Amazon we’re talking about, the retailer everyone looks to for leadership in usability and conversion rate optimization.

Compare that to their much easier-on-the-eyes mobile homepage:

The page's simple design limits the number of eye-catching elements, making it much more effective.

The gazeplot for Amazon's mobile homepage tells us that the Kindle promo draws most of the attention.

This heatmap shows again that the page's primary focus is on the Kindle, and only secondary to that are the other, photo-less, calls to action.

The difference isn’t always as dramatic, as when the layout has already been well designed with a main focal point and the remainder of the page in secondary focus. Observe the change from eBay’s regular homepage to their mobile site:

The full-size eBay homepage design is built simply with the goal of drawing visitors to browse popular products or else to learn about eBay's buyer protection measures.

eBay's mobile homepage: designed to make visitors click through on a category.

Q: Based on the above example, couldn’t you argue against designing a homepage by starting with the mobile site? Where would you place the product spotlight?

A: It’s far more likely you’ll succumb to the temptation to clutter your homepage if you first create a full-size design, rather than designing the mobile homepage first.

Besides, look at the focused, effective job Amazon did with their mobile homepage, which spotlights the Kindle. If you must have a spotlighted item, you can do that on mobile and translate that later to your regular home. Note also that the valuable upper-left hand screen real estate on eBay’s full size homepage is dedicated to the main navigation, just as the mobile site design emphasizes it.

So if you’re designing a new site for a client, here’s a best practice tip:

Build the mobile homepage design first. Then port that to the non-mobile version of the homepage. You’ll find a lighter, more usable design.

Even better, by starting with the mobile design, you have less to do quality assurance testing on before going live. That means you can get a design out faster.

Liked this? Check out my collection of links and guidelines on mobile landing pages and this mobile usability case study.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Two reasons:

1) Some of the most popular contact form plugins, including Contact Form 7, don’t provide a thankyou page. That means that you can’t easily set up a simple ab-test in Google Website Optimizer (GWO) to increase conversions, because GWO requires a thankyou page. Doh! (I realize I’m running that plugin, but I’m not actively seeking new consulting clients, so it’s not a priority to fix that.)

2) Typically, the contact button says submit by default. It’s well known that you want to match the button to your headline, and people didn’t come to your contact page with servitude in mind and/or kinky S&M messaging. They came to contact you. So the default button should read “Contact Us” or “Send Contact Message” … Submit isn’t clear and cuts conversions.

Like this post on conversion rate optimization (CRO) and usability? Get a free chapter from my advanced SEO book, which offers tactics covering the overlap between CRO and SEO.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I’ve been digging into online marketing tools and to my chagrin, most want an annual fee (or one time payment usually roughly equivalent). It’s the rise of SAAS…

Email:

MailerLite: Was on Discount from MightyDeals (found via Yoast) for $49/year!! Up to 10K subs… Love this pricing!
Or MailChimp: Free for up to 2K subs, plus very impressive segment-upon-signup options so you can better tailor content and increase open rates. Starting $49/mo thereafter.

I currently have Aweber which so far has been good, and their support’s generally been good – which is very important. I’m mostly interested in switching due to price (mailerlite) and functionality (chimp). Paying $29/mo for service at my # of subs (over 500, under 2k), for the advanced SEO book.

Contact Management / Social Media Analytics

The first two here are relationship-measuring social analytics tools. The latter is a traffic measuring social analytics tool.

I currently have BuzzStream which is pretty sweet. It automatically finds contact info, can track all email contact and Twitter contact too (going forward, non-historical), plus has various link building metrics and social media functions built in too, though personally my orientation is more the link building side. Starting $19/mo.

ConnectedHQ: Contact Management with full historical data and integrations with various social services. Measure and strengthen your relationships so you get more exposure and traffic. $10/mo

The reason ConnectedHQ also appeals to me is because of more integrations (mostly FB, I’m not big on LinkedIn) and historical data for them. Plus it’s affordable, which is great! Strong contrast to so many tools out there where average monthly price for a non-feature-neutered package is $49…

Awe.sm: Traffic analytics focused on social sharing where links are shared via means besides the browser (outlook, tweetdeck etc) and accurately reporting on where Twitter/FB/LinkedIn traffic really originated from, down to the particular tweet! Valuable for optimizing social media campaigns focused on traffic / conversions. Starting $15/mo

VaultPress: Multiple cloud-based backups + security monitoring for WP, by the creators of WP at Automattic. $40/mo and + for service including security. $15 for cloud backups which is basically not worth paying for since existing WP plugins do that.

Or: CodeGuard: Roughly the same idea but not WP specific. Unclear if they provide human support for cleaning bugs and reinstalling. $15/mo — Update: Got CodeGuard!

VisualWebsiteOptimizer: Tempted by their easy WYSIWYG interface… for better CRO testing. GWO’s horrible, sprawling documentation and disorganized forums are also a massive pain to navigate. $49/mo + for a decent package.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Want to a/b test your WordPress (WP) website without the cranky, unreliable Google Website Optimizer (GWO) plugins?

The problem with using Google Website Optimizer with WordPress:

1. Google Website Optimizer was designed with static html pages in mind, as opposed to pages created by a content management system like WordPress.

Each post on a WordPress-powered website relies on multiple different files, such as header.php, sidebar.php, post.php etc. Google Website Optimizer requires you to place code on the page you’re going to test, which is made more difficult because of the dynamic inclusion of the header, sidebar, body of the post etc.

2. Various WP plugins supposedly resolve the difficulty. In fact, they don’t solve it for two reasons:

• These plugins limit what you can test to the content of the post, and not the title, layout, navigation and other very important aspects of the page.
• They don’t work with custom themes – which is likely your case if you’re putting money into A/B testing or multivariate (MVT) testing. I’ve failed to make GWO work on this WordPress site despite numerous efforts and following instructions to the letter.

In short, what you need is for your WordPress pages to be static html …

So here’s how to a/b test any page/post on your WordPress site, and any aspect of it!
All for free using Google Website Optimizer…

1) Navigate to the WordPress page you want to test, in your browser.

2) Click File -> Save File As and download the page. With Firefox, this downloads two things: i) a folder including all the graphics, CSS and backend voodoo that makes the page pretty and ii) the final html that is sent to the browser to display on your screen.

3) Upload the folder and html file from step 2 to your server. This is your control version of the page.

4) Create one or more copies of the folder and html file, and edit as needed for your test. This is your experimental version of the page.

5) Upload the copy/ies to your server. Important: Don’t upload to a folder in which WordPress is installed, because doing so will cause the newly uploaded page will take forever to load (in my case, 30 seconds+). This means that if WordPress powers your whole site (e.g. it’s installed in the root folder), you’ll need to test on a subdomain or another domain. I suspect this may also be true of trying to upload the file to a page where other CMSes are installed

6) Edit both the control and experimental pages to include the Google Website Optimizer code.

7) Optional: Use a 302 Temporary Redirect on the existing page to send the traffic to your control page and let GWO split the traffic between the “A” (control) version and “B” (experimental) version of the test page. You want to use a temporary redirect because you’re only doing this until you find a better version of the page.

Alternately, you can use a 301 permanent redirect if you don’t want to be bothered keeping the WP version of the page later.

Optional: If you tested layout or something graphical besides content, have a dev create a special “page template” that you can select when creating a new WP page. That way you’ll be able to keep the new version within the control of WordPress, while getting the higher conversion rate of your new version.

A summary of this approach’s benefits:

- It’s easier than breaking your head trying to install GWO on a custom theme and never succeeding at having it validate.
- It provides more flexibility in what you can test than the existing plugins out there.
- You’re still using GWO, so it’s free.

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Have you been paying $29 and now $39 a head for usertesting.com?

Mashable has a list of free and commercial screencasting tools, including web-based/online ones.

The Screencasting Handbook has another list with certain other ones listed and describing relevant feature differences.

Finally, some generous soul gave Wikipedia a really comprehensive list of such tools, but without much detail on features.

You can use this plus the methodology in Rocket Science Made Easy (Steve Krug’s guide to usability testing) for really cheap tests, or even free ones.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Paul May co-founded BuzzStream, a CRM for link building and PR/social media that allows online marketers to manage relationships and be more effective in getting results, be they links or press. He gave me the following two-part interview about the software creation and startup process.

I’d already interviewed Ann Smarty before about her creation of MyBlogGuest and her insights on iteration, usability and the startup process.

Have you used usability testing along the way? If so, what role has it played (share examples)?

I talk to at least two customers every day, so I’m always getting feedback…we conduct formal usability testing any time we launch a major feature. Our testing approach is based on Steve Krug’s usability testing methodology – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QckIzHC99Xc.

Here’s how we did it when we launched the new prospecting tool:

• We had ten people test the product. Four of these were people at agencies dedicated to link building, two were at large SEO agencies, and four were in-house link builders.
• We break testing up into two phases.

  In our first phase we have the testers walk through a series of linked balsamiq mockups. The thing I love about using balsamiq mockups is that it’s great for identifying features you can cut before you get into code…when you see all the things that people stumble over and when they tell you which things they really care about, it makes it much easier to figure out the minimum viable feature-set.

  The downside to balsamiq mockups is that they force the user through a specific workflow, so your visibility into the true user experience is limited. Given this, we use mockups with three or four testers and then move to working code.

• When we’re testing, we give the tester control over our screen and ask them to complete specific tasks to see how easily they can accomplish them. For the prospecting tool, our scenarios were:
  1) Find prospects,
  2) Evaluate prospects,
  3) Add prospects to your account.

  As they go through each step, we have them say everything that they’re thinking. This helps us identify spots where our language is confusing, our workflow is cumbersome, etc.

Two of the big takeaways from the usability testing for the prospecting tool:

1. Using language like “keywords” confused people and led to poor selection of prospecting phrases (people thought they should just enter the same keywords they’re trying to rank on).

Just changing the language to “prospecting searches” significantly changed the way people used the product.

2. For the first release, people didn’t want or need a tool that automatically creates the prospecting phrases for them…
They just wanted to enter prospecting queries on their own and then let BuzzStream de-duplicate results and collect the data. This cut out a ton of development that we thought we needed in order to deliver a v1 product.

What lead you guys to integrate Twitter so tightly?

Initially because it scratched an itch that we had…we were engaging with people on twitter and people were talking about us there, but we had no way to leverage this. All these great things were happening there and if we had a history of it at our fingertips, we could build better outreach lists and engage more effectively…but it was as though the second after you tweeted someone or they tweeted about your company, the information would just scatter to the wind.

Do you have plans to integrate other social websites in the future? Digg? StumbleUpon? Facebook?

We’ve built a prototype for automatic discovery of blog comments, but we haven’t integrated it into the product yet….the truism with software is that you have to support anything you deliver and it’s much easier to add a feature than kill it, so we’re being careful here.

The next few months will be heavily weighted towards usability and UI features, and we’ll use that time to conduct some market research on social discovery features like this. I would love to hear thoughts from you and your readers about this. [Ed: I think this is valuable for the same reason as the Twitter integration, but also because it allows you to know who to work with when you need to promote something on those sites.]

Do you have grandfathered pricing?

Yes. We haven’t raised our prices, but we did change our pricing model.

In the past, each plan included a large number of users and a relatively small number of contacts and links. The overwhelming feedback we’ve gotten is that people needed more contacts and links. To meet the need we raised the number of contacts and links in each plan, but we also reduced the number of users in each plan.

For the vast majority of our current customers, this meant they got more links for the same price, but there were some customers that would have had to move to a more expensive plan to keep the same number of users. For them, we’ve grandfathered them into their current plan, but if they want to move to the new model, they’re able to do this at a significant discount.

Liked it? Check out Buzzstream today!

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Do CSS galleries actually show the right way forward for web design?

Via a fascinating post on whitespace and visual hierarchy at Usability Post, I also discovered the UX part of Stack Exchange, one of the web’s biggest Q&A sites. It’s got loads of intermediate-advanced questions and is well worth a visit for people responsible for designing user interfaces. Warning: You might get hooked!

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Why not put a news feed of your company’s latest press releases on the homepage?

Because 99 times out of 100, you won’t have news to share on a sufficiently regular basis to make the use of space effective and worthwhile. The net result is that you look silly, when, halfway through 2011, your news section still carries items from 2010.

I admit that I did this for about 3-4 years on my homepage until changing to a new homepage.

Since then, I changed my homepage to be more focused on getting the click through to other pages. However, I recently noticed that Commission Junction still has the News section on their site:

Commission Junction News on homepage

This error is even worse when you think of how valueable homepage real estate is, and how intensely it’s fought over in turf battles.

If you liked this bit of critical thinking, check out a free chapter of my book for easy lessons on doing this yourself.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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This is a guest post by Stephen Croome of buyaniPad.com; his bio is below.

A baseline for mobile growth

Real numbers and our plan going forward:

There is a lot spoken on the growth of mobile but not much actual data shared. SEOmoz recently posted trends for mobile in 2011 and I thought I would contribute to the discussion with a baseline for expected mobile growth based on real sales data.

I have included data from two very different but high traffic sites. One is a pure play commercial sales site, and the other is a site that is purely informational. Neither have a mobile version of the site although both websites display fine on smartphones.

Hopefully this information helps people make better projections for their own clients. I encourage you to share real data so we can build a better picture of where the next few years’ growth is going come from.

UK sales site’s revenue from mobile devices

Conversion rate for mobile devices:

Click to enlarge

You can see I found an error in how Blackberries interact with our site, 0.08% conversion rate is far too low. Analytics ftw!

On digging into the problem I found it was merely that Blackberrys seem to be terrible for buying date and price intensive things online. I sat with a colleague and I bought a ticket on my iPhone 4 in about 2 minutes and he just gave up after 5. So, not all smart phones are equal!

The iPad conversion rate looks way ahead of handheld mobiles. Is this going to be an emerging theme – larger devices converting better than smaller? It makes sense to me but we will know when more players like the Galaxy Tab filter into the market.

Growth in mobile sales with projection:

This growth looks amazing and I think that when we look back at the end of the year, the growth that I’ve plotted is likely to be conservative.

However, let’s not get carried away just yet:

As a % of overall revenue, mobile sales are still small.

UK information site

This site has no sales, just public information. Warning: These projections are rough and ready due to the volatility of their traffic.

Visit data for mobile devices:

When you look at the visits by device data, you see more pages per visits and lowest bounce rate on the iPad. Other devices have a high average time on site but a low pages per visit and a high bounce rate.

I would suggest this is because people have more difficulty using the site on mobile devices and less on the iPad. Mobile is growing, but it still has form factor challenges to overcome.

Growth in mobile visits with projections:

However, let’s not get carried away just yet…

As a % of overall visits, mobile traffic is still small.

Mobile health tips

Whatever the level of buy-in to mobile in your organisation, there are a few universal tips that will serve you well
• Share your knowledge with your clients
• Have an opinion on mobile and a plan (even if it’s not likely to be actioned immediately)
• Push for mobile best practice, at least a simple mobile version of your sites
• Stay on top of the data, make sure you can clearly measure mobile sales and interactions on your sites

About Stephen: I’m a SEO interested in getting companies to re-engineer their products and processes to market themselves. I have some test sites that need some love www.buyanipad.com where I look at spam and www.purehairstyle.com where I look at the peculiarities of image search and generating impressions per visit. In my spare time I dream up marketing ideas like www.startupbeanbags.com.

You can follow me at your own peril at seomoz or @firstconversion

If you liked this post, you should also check out this post on mobile landing pages.

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Should you built sites for users, not search engines? Or is there a middle ground?…

Inspired by the  Montreal PPC experts at Bloom Search Marketing, I came across the following excellent bit of navigation. It’s great for users … and can also tie in nicely with SEO, which I’ll get to after explaining the beauty from a conversion perspective.

The Conversion Angle

I’d venture a bet that this navigation is probably doing wonders for the site’s conversion rate. Why? Because it allows people to penetrate more deeply into the site by browsing according to criteria that matters to them.

For those of you familiar with sales closing tactics, this is the “either-or” close. You don’t ask whether or not people want to buy – you ask them to pick an attribute of the product that they care about.

It’s win-win: the buyer narrows down the field of potential candidates and makes his choice easier, while the seller gets an increased level of commitment to the sale. In conversion rate optimization terms, this navigation drives people further into the website off the homepage, which is exactly what the homepage’s purpose exists for.

Hence this recent screen cap of a mobile site developed for Carnival Cruise Lines:

(via SEL’s mobile friendly vs mobile SEO article)

Notice that the key navigation there is to select what kind of cruise you’re interested in? Excellent.

The SEO approach to category navigation

If you’ve ever browsed ecommerce sites with an eye towards SEO, you’ll often notice long, scrolling sidebars full of category links. They often look something like this:

Shop for wines by:

Country:

Wines from France

Wines from Israel

Wines from Germany

Wines from USA

Wines from Canada

Wines from Australia

Grape:

Sauvignon Blanc Wines

Sauvignon Roughe Wines

Merlot Wines

Pinot Grigiot Wines

Pinot Noir Wines

etc. etc.

You can see how these lists quickly grow into massive monstrosities whose sole purpose is to direct search engines deeper into the site – not humans. Humans scan, and lists this long repulse the scanning eye. (Not to mention the annoying keyword stuffing. Just say, “Shop for wines from:” and list the countries…)

That may be acceptable if your strategy is centered on driving search traffic to your category pages and converting visitors from there.

But that strategy neglects the home page… the strongest page on your site from an SEO perspective! Why not try to rank the homepage for some core terms? And if you rank, obviously you need to convert too – which means that you want your navigation to lead people further into the site! (See above regarding the conversion side of things.)

To summarize: The problem is that your SEO strategy here – if you use normal text links instead of SEO unfriendly Javascript dropdowns – is that you’re hurting conversion. And if you use Javascript here to present conversion friendly menus that don’t repulse the eye, you compromise your SEO.

So what’s the solution?

Noscript!

Noscript is to Javascript as alt text is to images.

Noscript replaces the content of the Javascript for users who have it turned off or don’t execute it – like Googlebot (OK, Googlebot is beginning to execute JS, but that’s still unreliable).

You code the Javascript menu, and show it to everyone with Javascript turned on. You put your long, ugly list of links within the Noscript tags and tell Googlebot what your Javascript is presenting to humans.

Liked this simple but effective tactic to balance SEO and conversion? Get more of the same with my advanced SEO book, which features a number of chapters on the very topic.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Ted Ulle is a veteran member of WebmasterWorld, where he’s better known as Tedster. He moderates the HTML and Google SEO forums there, as well as serving as an Administrator. He’s on Pubcon’s advisory board, the chief search strategist at Converseon, a global online marketing agency for enterprise-level companies, and is on Twitter as TedUlle. You can find out more about Converseon and Ted’s professional affiliations at the end of the post.

I saw Ted give a remarkable and controversial presentation at Pubcon Las Vegas 2010, where he notably criticized most implementations of dropdown navigation as overstuffed. We spoke afterwards and Ted consented to give me the following interview. For answers that required clarification, I inserted an asterisk at the appropriate spot and added the clarification question and answer immediately after.

1) Shari Thurow criticizes SEOs who organize information architecture (IA) around keywords. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyNCxltHrxk ) Assuming you have content that matches those keywords, what is the problem with that practice? Isn’t that “siloing” or “theming” your navigation?

I’d say Shari is right. Information Architecture (IA) needs to be designed around the VISITORS’ needs.

If you start from a foundation of “I need to get these particular keywords into the main navigation”, then you’re very likely to miss the optimum way to bucket your content. What you want is a natural, self-explanatory set of buckets that make browsing the site a joy instead of an anxiety.

There’s a major difference in context going on here. Keyword data is generated by people who are using a search engine. That context is pretty much unconstrained, semantically. But site navigation is offered to visitors who are already on your website. The context is now much more defined and constrained.

That said, once you do have visitor-oriented buckets, you certainly should use keyword research. It can inform you on how best to label those buckets for navigation. And I wouldn’t only use search engine keyword tools, either. I would mine social media, customer emails, and I would strongly advise involving customer service personnel in the vocabulary choices.

But again, themes and silo decisions are not, at their most fundamental level, IA issues. They are more like technical SEO issues. When it comes to creating the IA, SEO needs to be on the back burner and any compromises should lean toward visitor needs.

2) When a product can fit into more than one category (e.g. black shoes and New Balance shoes), should it be listed in both? Are alternative suggestions preferable? (E.g. Items in this category overlap with items in {category A} and {category B} ({links}) ) What’s your favored solution?

Human minds make extensive use of cross-categorization. That’s an essential survival trait for our species. The challenge is that no two people categorize in the same exact way. Any team who has worked on Information Architecture for a large site certainly has experienced this challenge, just among web team members.

So it’s inevitable that many schemes for classifying content are going to come up. However, it is essential to choose just one for the sake of not confusing the visitor. The visitor does not know your inventory or content the way that you do. If they navigate to the same item in two different ways, they will not be sure that it actually IS the same item.* Then they begin to feel that the site itself is confusing – and they lose the confidence needed to motivate a conversion.

So the main navigation – the core Information Architecture – needs to be a fundamental beacon that the visitor can depend on to stay oriented. The job of the Information Architect is to create a consistent structure that most people will relate to easily.

That said, there are certainly other ways to offer categorization. Faceted navigation systems of all kinds are possible through sorted site search, or via browsing categories. However these options should clearly be offered as alternatives, or supplemental avenues. They should not be presented in a way that is confused with the main system of buckets that forms the backbone of the site’s IA.

There are significant SEO challenges to these alternative offerings, too. But that’s a topic for another day. The essential point is to pick just one structure for the Information Architecture and then supplement that as needed to serve the minority needs that some visitors may have.

*) I don’t see how people are going to be confused by finding a pair of black shoes from browsing that category and seeing the same shoes when they click under “Brands -> New Balance.” Why would they doubt that it’s the same SKU. Perhaps this is more true for undifferentiated items/commodities?

Yes, I do see what you’re saying. I was trying to cover all types of websites in my comments, not just e-commerce. And that’s probably why it seems like we’re not on the same page. Pure shopping sites are ofen more like ordering utilities and customers can arrive with a pretty clear idea of what they want. However, when the product mix is diverse, then IA becomes important for getting more items per sale, as well as customer retention for repeat purchases – and that’s a major factor in ongoing success.

I’ve seen the problems that cross-categorized menu choices can make first hand, especially on corporate sites that are more by information than by direct selling. For a small e-comm site with a very homogeneous selection, users can discover almost anything they want quickly.

For shoes, you probably could have “browse by brand” and “browse by color” with no problem – but is that ideal for a main menu? How do you integrate the non-purchasing information pages, for example? And how do you draw the line on creating more splits? Browse by sport also seems important. Browse by gender? Browse by price? Browse by material? Laces versus velcro? The menu is getting chaotic now and I’m sure there are other divisions possible than the ones I named. What happens if the site expands into casual shoes and dress shoes too?

It’s been fascinating to watch Amazon’s IA evolve over the years. They do extreme testing and metrics, so each iteration is driven by results more than opinion. And they’ve now dropped the tabbed menu at the top completely – pretty much expecting people to use site search. Effective site search is another major challenge, but it’s not Information Architecture.

I guess Amazon became so huge that they couldn’t find a traditional IA resolution. How do you sell a Kindle book, a convection oven and a Steinway concert grand on the same site, you know? It is interesting to notice that the site search department choices are MUCH more limited than the department list on the left side.

3) Which popular shopping cart currently available makes it easiest to get IA right?

The fundamental job of the Information Architect should be done BEFORE the shopping cart is set up and products entered. That job boils down to two steps. They may sound deceptively simple, but they can hold a world of pain.

1. How should all the bits of this content inventory be grouped?
2. What should we call each group?

As you can see, those two sets of decisions need to be made prior to any technology choice. Most so-called “shopping carts” are a lot more than just a shopping cart. They are also a kind of CMS or content management system. Because they are hoping to be useful for many kinds of end users, they have grown in flexibility and complexity over the years. However, they still tend to embed various problems for both the Information Architect and the SEO.

My favorite third party shopping cart has no pretension of being a CMS – and that’s Americart. The code runs on a third party server and it is therefore platform independent. All you need to do is understand their tagging system and then tag your buy buttons. The entire structure of your site and all its pages is completely up to you. You can generate the entire cart with a spreadsheet.

When it comes to the vast array of self-hosted carts that are available, I’d suggest that the Information Architecture be established first, along with other need. Then the various choices can be assessed according to how well they match up.

Most of the shopping cart challenges I see are SEO related rather than IA related. But a website should never be designed to accommodate the shortcomings of any tool.

4) Jakob Nielsen argues that rollover/dropdown navigation annoys users. Yet dropdowns (when not used as a crutch) can help flatten a site’s architecture, thus improving indexing of deep pages. What guidance can you give people to get this right?

If a deep page needs more frequent indexing or link equity (pretty much the same thing) that does not mean that page changes its position in the information architecture. There are many other ways to drive the spiders besides getting shifty with the main menu – including links within the content, secondary call-out boxes, most popular lists and so on.

Nielsen is right. Changing the navigation means shifting the visible Information Architecture.* That is extremely disorienting. Imagine a highway that doesn’t standardize its road signs. Think of a hospital that uses inconsistent signage. That is a big problem for hospital signage because the IA of a hospital building needs to serve many different audiences: basic staff, professional staff, visitors, patients, and even investors.

Solving such a challenge is not easy. It often requires a trade-off or three. But we should always trade in the direction of simplicity and stability, rather than doing what seems opportunistic. Otherwise we confuse the visitor and they abandon our site. And well they should – we are messing with them!
There are a lot of tools in the toolkit. So don’t try to throw every possibility at every possible application. Let your visitors calm down and breathe a bit so they feel welcome and at ease.

*) I don’t see how dropdown menus are like inconsistent navigation. I’d say a better analogy is the digital signage you increasingly see to explain upcoming road construction’s location and alternative routes to the now-blocked destination, in that they add more detail to the main message. Can you clarify your view?

In either case, whether it’s inconsitent navigation or dropdown/hover menus, visitors cannot easily compare their possibilities side by side – they are only seeing one at a time. This violates Steve Krug’s “don’t make me think” principle.

One of the challenges in any Information Architecture discussion is that the principles are highly abstracted – and they need to be applied in very concrete situations to have any hope of reaching consensus. Real differences between web team members are extremely common, just as you and I are having differences in how we see these principles right now. And we don’t even have a real web development project in front of us!

I don’t really understand your detour metaphor, for instance. As I said earlier, people do not all build categories the same way, even though we all build categories. If you and I were working together on a project, we would need to explore the mismatch between our thinking styles. That discussion could be difficult, and that’s why IA is so often abandoned – people want to avoid the feeling of conflict between team members so they buy into some agreement or other.

The end result of persevering through those difficult spots to arrrive at a real agreement is the creation of a great website, rather than just another standard website. The last IA project I worked on took 8 weeks of almost daily meetings before we arrived at a stable place.

5) It was common to see a site’s main navigation being largely ignored by users, who focus instead on the active window. Is that still the case today? Or is the ever-increasing familiarity with the web making that a moot point?

Yes, it’s still common to see visitors not clicking on the main navigation. But just because they don’t click a lot doesn’t mean they are ignoring it. It’s a quality signal, a grounding influence that they depend on if they should ever become lost as they browse.

Focusing on the active window is natural – and it means that you’ve actually engaged the visitor. They caught the “information scent” and are at ease. You’ve done your job. On a great website, the main navigation is a kind of “In Case of Emergency” sign.

There is such a thing as navigation blindness, too – something like banner blindness. That can often be the result of a design flaw. If the navigation looks or reads like and ad, then it wasn’t created with the visitor as top priority, but rather with some mistaken idea of SEO or boosting sales.

The best way to boost sales is to keep the visitor comfortable. Every visitor needs to learn a new interface every time they go to a new website. Don’t make them work too hard. A comfortable visitor is more likely to become a customer or client.

6) It is increasingly popular in ecommerce to use dynamic slideshows in the homepage’s active window, instead of offering various links to main product categories (which solves the problem of users ignoring the main navigation). What experience do you have with this? What’s theoretically the best solution? Does that differ from reality?

I’m currently working with a website that recently introduced a jquery slideshow approach so I can see the numbers for a present time implementation. The slide show certainly made the home page look snazzy as hell. The problem is, it isn’t improving sales – it seems to have hurt them.* Even worse, several home page rankings have also slipped since the slideshow’s introduction.

So the current debate is about dropping the whole thing and going with the old-fashioned approach again. That is what I would have predicted had they run the idea past me first. It’s good to experiment as long as you watch the metrics and make quite changes if the metrics show a problem.

It looks to me like this particular experiment had a negative result. As long as we don’t fall in love with our ideas, almost anything is worth a try. My friend at Converseon, Mike Moran, wrote a business book called “Do It Wrong Quickly.” That title just sums it up.

As a general rule, I’d say that slideshows are like any other dynamic navigation – even hover menus. The challenge is that visitors cannot see the possible selections side-by-side and compare them. And with any eye candy approach, you risk distracting the visitor from even noticing what your full offering is. I know that’s what happens to me, and I don’t like it. In fact, I get quite impatient with it.

*) Regarding the slideshow, is it the case that categories that are later on in the slide-deck are getting lower CTR than previously? Have you guys tested a slideshow that used previews like Yahoo.com’s news section?

In the case I’m currently looking at, it’s actually the first slide that’s getting the lowest CTR – no matter which option they put first.

Sorry, I’m not familiar with slideshow previews in the Yahoo news section – and I couldn’t find an example to make an informed answer.

7) How can someone get a deeper understanding of Information Architecture?
There are painfully few resources available, even after all these years of ecommerce. IA is hard work and most people would rather go into avoidance. There are a few resources I do recommend:

1. O’Reilly has a solid book – the best source book I know of, now in its third edition. It’s called “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web“. See

2. If you want to go the free route, Webmonkey has a long-standing IA tutorial. It offers you least a top-level survey view of what IA is all about.

3. And finally – come to PubCon in Austin TX this March, just before SXSW. I’ll be offering an “Expert Spotlight Session” on Information Architecture, expanded from the most recent Las Vegas session. For more on that see http://www.pubcon.com/austin2011-expertspotlight-conference.htm.

Converseon‘s been working with enterprise clients since 2001 and offering a unified approach to all things web. They were recently featured in the Forrester Wave report as having one of the top social listening technologies in the world. We are one of only a very few agencies to have access to the full Twitter Firehose rather than just an API.

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

If you’re designing a custom landing page, chances are that you’re using a PSD to HTML chop shop, like my friends at PSD to HTML/CSS. The problem is that things you may obviously require won’t be obvious to the coders.

Here’s a checklist of things to specify in your PSD to html landing page order in your order to minimize revisions and save time.

1) Editable text.

If you have a button on the page, or fancy headers, you’ll probably want to test them.

If you don’t specify to the coders that the text must be editable , you may just get an image of text, instead of a button image with editable text positioned over it (the positioning is done using CSS). That will make testing harder, as you’ll need to get the graphic artist to design new buttons, headers etc for each test.

2) CSS that enables flexible width page and buttons.

The corollary to having editable text is that you’ll need the page width to be flexible, and likewise your button width. Otherwise you’ll find that the positioning of the page elements will overlap and look aweful.

3) Flexible borders on images.

You don’t want your hero shot to get overlapped by a border, so ensure the border will adjust to the image size. Otherwise you’ll constantly need to crop, and get things pixel perfect.

4) Form submissions lead from the landing page to a thankyou page.

Most conversion tracking requires placing javascript code on a thankyou page. If your form executes with AJAX, your conversion tracking becomes a lot more complex for nothing.

5) Easy to comment out sections of the html.

You won’t know whether an element’s presence helps or distracts until you test it. For that reason, you want arguably distracting elements to be coded in such a way that you can easily comment them out. The end result should still look good, and not have overlapping or ‘broken-looking’ elements.

6) The logo should not be wrapped in html tags reading “h1″.

This seems obvious, but sometimes things get coded this way. If you ever want to rank the page, or use the template for another page you want to rank, this is something to check over.

7) Test the landing page ASAP.

Most providers provide a time-specific support guarantee, like 30 days free support. If you buy a design but then delay launching the campaign for too long, you may find bugs after the guarantee period.

At that point, you’re at the mercy of the provider whether or not they’ll fix the bug.

Partly, it’s an accounting thing – they need to know when the revenue is fully “earned” for accrual accounting purposes.

Partly it’s also a memory thing. When the code is recent, the coder can edit and proofread more easily than if he has to re-read the whole thing from scratch.

So once you get your code, put in your various texts and images etc and see how it performs.

Pay attention especially to longer vs shorter text, and functionality of buttons and forms. How are errors handled? Can users correct the mistake easily? Is the error message clear and not insulting ([You entered incorrect information [you idiot]” vs “We had trouble understanding your phone # because…”)?

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I saw this flyer at the busstop and had to grab it to share with you guys. I think it’s brilliant advertising, and here’s why.

First, the copy is cleverly written and memorable.

Direct Response Flyer with a clever title, "On Canada's best network, they're not just smartphones, they're geniusphones."

“On Canada’s best network, they’re not just smartphones, they’re geniusphones.” I grant you that it’s feature/advantage copy instead of being benefit oriented, but the witticism sticks with you, and encourages you to read on. I guess that’s another way to grab people’s attention, besides QPBC.

The subheadline does a good job clarifying what they mean, although it’s still advantage oriented rather than getting into benefits. What’s the point of fewest failures, clear reception and global coverage? “Do more things in more places” is a pretty vague benefit statement.

Another thing I like about the top of this flyer is the bold blue stripes. They’re reminiscent of Bell’s corporate colors, and kind of steal credibility from Bell’s own branding efforts, which have involved lots of strongly branded ads here in Montreal.

Direct response flyer with good call to action usability

Finally, I want to point out the intelligent design of the call to action. Besides for numerous pull-and-tear phone numbers, the phone number is still listed at the bottom of the ad. Even if all the pull-and-tear numbers are torn off, the ad can still generate calls! Smart thinking. You also have the address on the bottom and the nearest metro station (torn blue square, at right).

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Can you see what’s wrong with Listorious’ search bar?

It took me several long, frustrating minutes before I realized that the search bar wasn’t just for finding individuals…

It’s also for finding lists.

Which is what I went there for in the first place.

But if you just read what the search box says, you’d think that this site has a serious problem.

It’s made for finding Twitter lists… then provides no convenient means to find them. Instead, it’s bait-n-switching me to find individuals? Huh?

What happened was probably something like this…

“PSD-to-html converter: What do I put as the pre-fill suggestion text for the search bar?
Listorious: Oh, you know… Our business is connecting people to experts on Twitter. That can be people in lists, individuals whatever.
PSD to html guy: OK then. *Thinks of lowest common denominator.* *Types: ‘Find experts on Twitter.’ * “

But people – like me – will think, “WTF? Where’s the search bar for lists?” I only figured this out because I’m a web geek and imagined what happened in Listorious’ site dev process.

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Splash Page SEO – Rank despite the splash page!

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Guides

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/designing-for-mobile-web
http://mashable.com/2009/11/26/mobile-web-design/
http://abduzeedo.com/mobile-web-design
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20946338/Great-Mobile-Landing-Pages – A useful presentation for beginners. The authors created Movitas, which has the most affordable WYSIWYG mobile page creator I found. (Besides the free, uber-basic Movylo.)

Mobile Web Design Galleries
http://www.mobileawesomeness.com/mobile-web-resources/ – A blog and design gallery with useful resources linked
http://www.mobisitegalore.com/index.html – Another gallery

WYSIWYGs

https://movitas.com/Movitas/pricingComparison.aspx
http://www.tekora.com/en/ – Another mobile WYSIWYG
Very basic: http://www.movylo.com/
Really pricey: http://mobify.me/features/

Slice Shops Turn PSD and AI Graphics Into XHTML, WML etc

http://www.mobilizetoday.com/xhtml-conversion – Seemed to have pretty affordable pricing for slicing up graphics into mobile landers, but it wasn’t clear if they’d do WML either…
https://w3-markup.com/ – A site that will slice your graphics into a working lander, but they don’t do WML. Use them if your target is newer devices that can support 320px wide graphics etc.
http://www.zestadz.com/help/help_landing_page_tool – Unclear if you need to use Zestadz to get their tool, however.

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When asking people to fill in the fields, be clear on the format of the answer you expect. Specify what characters can be used, and what characters can’t be used.

Don’t wait to correct people until after they’ve clicked continue, because you’ll be using up your visitor’s supply of patience. Advise them at the outset of the right process. Try combining this with AJAX error notifications that don’t wait until people click continue, in order to be more efficient.

The more you dip into that reservoir of patience, the fewer conversions you get.

If you require people to use both letters and numbers in their passwords, say so in the form. If you want it a certain length, say so.

Password must include numbers and letters – why didn’t you say so to begin with??

Similarly, how was I supposed to know that a field labelled “City / State / Country” would not accept forward-slashes?

You’re begging for slashes by naming the field like that – it suggests the format people should answer in.

Ironically, in the very same form, I saw the following very clear, and commendable instructions:

Fill in your name as it appears on your passport. Clear. Concise. Avoids nicknames, initials and other abbreviations. Effective!

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.