Just when you think you’ve made something idiot proof, someone goes
and builds a better idiot. We know your visitors aren’t idiots, but if
you make your site so a 5 year old can use it then your visitors will
be able to do so without even thinking about it.

You already know how to use your site, so do the people who built it,
but what about your visitors?Small stumbling blocks in the journey
through your site can cost you a fortune in missed opportunities and
you and your designers may not be able to see the wood for the trees.

Usability testing should be done early, before you launch and
certainly before you start spending money promoting it. Usability
studies needn’t be expensive, they’re no longer the preserve of the
big boys, getting real life people who weren’t involved in building
your site to test it for you is the best money you will ever spend.

Multivariate Testing

Picture the scenario; your marketing people have written a new slogan,
your web designer has made a new layout and your graphics guys have
designed a new logo. Your MD likes the logo but hates the copy, your
sales Director loves the copy but hates the layout and you love the
layout but hate the logo.

You could argue these points for ever, you could ask more people in
your organisation, you could employ consultants to decide for you, you
could flip a coin or ask Paul the psychic octopus.

And you would probably still get it wrong.

The best, simplest and cheapest way to make the decision is to test.
In the scenario above, you have two logos, two layouts and two
slogans. If you were to make every possible combination you have eight
different versions of the page – 2 x 2 x 2 = 8.

Multivariate testing lets you test each version of the page on real
life customers – without them even knowing you’re testing.

Multivariate testing generates all the possible versions of your page,
displays them randomly to each visitor and measures the conversion
rate for each one. Not only that, it tells you which area – logo,
slogan or layout – has the biggest effect on conversion.

You get to make the decision based on real results from your visitors,
not on the personal opinions and vested interests of individuals.
Clever huh?

Visitors want to convert, that’s why they came to your site, you
should make sure your site makes it easy and doesn’t do anything that
will put them off.

Here are a few no-brainers that a surprising number of sites get wrong:

Bad Navigation – make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for
Hide your contact details
Make visitors fill out complicated forms
Make your pages cluttered
Ask for loads of information
Don’t show shipping costs up front
Use tiny, poor quality photos

Exactly what you need to do to increase your conversion rate will be
unique to your site, products, services and visitors, so how do you
know what to do? And more importantly how do you know whether the
changes you made work or not?

The answer to both of these questions is testing. Find potential
conversion rate problems with usability testing and then decide which
fixes work the best with A/B or multivariate testing

Recently at Adhere we’ve been working on an online tool to enable you to easily compare your website against some of your competitors with a selection of important stats from search engines such as Google and Yahoo. You can see you website’s page rank, alexa traffic rank and homepage and site wide inbound links side by side with three competing sites of your choice.

See http://www.adhereseo.com/ for more details

Screenshot of one of our SEO services

A short video put together by Gavin from Media Dog of the night of the Media Circus event we ran at Fazeley Studios back at the end of October this year:

Media Circus 2010 from Karl Binder on Vimeo.

Please feel free to share this with whoever! The website that spawned the event is still available at www.creativebirmingham.com . No doubt we’ll be doing something different again next year. Looking forward to 2011, get in touch if you’d like to be involved in any way.

The new website for author Mark McLellan has gone live today. With the release of his new book ‘The Ski Lodge’ and his previous books now available on Lulu, MM is looking to continue to expand his website to include more of his writing and photos.

www.mmbooks.net