Web by Gonzo

Excellent article on communication.

“The Science of Subtle Signals: By analyzing overlooked behavioral cues, researchers are creating a new understanding of organizational effectiveness.”

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“In a wide variety of facets of everyday business, the keys to sustained success may actually lie in understanding the kinds of signals that are ordinarily overlooked: tone of voice, body language, the ways people congregate (or don’t), the time spent on tasks, the rhythms of workplace activity, and the patterns of social networks.”

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How does this relate to web development? Have you been in a meeting with 3 or more people and a decision has to be made about something as subjective as the background color of a web page?

That’s how.

I’m a big fan of Google Analytics and offer to install it on any of my clients’ sites that I think will benefit from the statistics it generates.

All web site statistics programs offer site owners information to make their web site more useful to their visitors, but Google does it with ample style and grace.

In addition to an admin panel that is simple to use and understand, the panel can generate beautiful, easy-to-read weekly and monthly reports that can be auto-emailed as a PDF, XML and comma- and tab-separated files. I’ve worked with Urchin, Hitbox, Omniture and some of the lesser-known stats applications offered by shared hosting providers and, for my money*, Google Analytics is the King.

I’m not the only fan of Google’s tool. Just the other day, I received an email newsletter from Duo Consulting, a large Chicago-based web dev company. In the newsletter, they mention, among other things, a new white paper called “Achieving Business Results with Google Analytics (156KB PDF).”

It’s a short, high-level read on how to identify, create and track your web site’s business goals using Google Analytics. Duo offers these suggestions to get started:

If yours is an e-commerce site, you might list among your goals increasing sales, increasing profitability of each sale and increasing the number of items per sale. If you are a lead generating site, your goals might include increasing the number of qualified leads, decreasing the number of false alarms and reducing the cost to generate a lead. Your informative website goals may include gaining subscribers to your content and having visitors obtain your branded PDF documents and v-cards.

It’s a quick read and I recommend it to anyone who needs a push to start using their site statistics to make their web site work, both for you and your visitors.

Contact me if you need a hand installing Google Analytics or digging into the data to see what you can learn from it.

*It’s free**.

**Actually, nothing is truly free. Google gains from the exposure and in aggregating your stats for larger statistical trending.

Jakob Nielsen’s recent Alertbox email newsletter shared some information on a new study by the Pew Foundation concerning the reasons users give for shopping online. According to Nielsen, when they compared this new study to a study Nielsen did in 1999, not much has changed.

Four reasons stated (percentages are people who agreed or strongly agreed):

78% Shopping online is convenient
77% Best place to buy items that are hard to find
68% Shopping online saves me time
49% Best place to find bargains

Compare these findings with the top four reasons given for shopping online in a 1999 survey:

83% Easy to place an order
63% Large selection of products
63% Cheaper prices
52% Faster service and delivery

The four reasons in 2007 are exactly the same as they were in 1999 (adjusting for different wordings from the two survey operators). The percentages are slightly different, and cheaper prices have swapped place with saving time

As Nielsen states, “It’s striking how LITTLE USER ATTITUDES CHANGED during 8 years when the Internet grew by 3,042%.”

You can read more about each of the studies here:

1999 survey:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990207.html

2007 survey:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/237/report_display.asp

Mark Hurst shares an interesting story that explains why it is important to design your site so it is easy to use. It’s a quick read with a simple premise:

“Stated more precisely, the easier we made it for users to achieve their goal, the more users would try it in the first place.”

Unless a shopper’s express intention was to roam the mall with no particular goal in mind, most shoppers* hate having to traipse all for hours through ever-growing malls to get what they want.

Don’t overburden your site and make your visitors feel the same way.

Know what you want your visitors to do when they get to your site, make sure it’s easy to do, and thank them for doing it.

*I’m ruling out teenagers who see the mall as a social environment more than a commerce-enabling site.

VirtualHosting.com has a great article from Christina Laun about how eye-tracking studies can help you build a better web site.

“Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies” offers a number of good ideas, including the following:

1. Text attracts attention before graphics

2. Initial eye movement focuses on the upper left corner of the page.

3. Users initially look at the top left and upper portion of the page before moving down and to the right.

4. Readers ignore banners.

5. Fancy formatting and fonts are ignored.

And 18 more. It’s a good read and valuable as you look at the content on your site or planning to add to your site.

A short blog post about some quick wins to make your site more usable for your visitors.

From UserEffect.com, “…in the spirit of saving you money and aggravation, here are 5 usability fixes that are relatively painless but can have a big impact,” including…

1. Increase Text Contrast
2. Increase Font Size
3. Increase Font Spacing
4. Reduce Home-page Copy
5. Make Links Look Clickable

Read the whole article for the details.

Jill Whalen provides some good information on paid search-engine marketing companies:

“Have you been held hostage by a search engine optimization (SEO) or search marketing company who claims that your search engine rankings will tank as soon as you stop paying them their monthly fee? If so, you’re not alone. Over the years I’ve heard this a number of times, and I’m here to tell you that under most circumstances, it’s just not true!”

Read the whole thing.

According to Wikipedia, “Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted the motto ‘Less is more’ to describe his aesthetic tactics of flattening and emphasizing a building’s frame, eliminating interior walls and adopting an open plan, and reducing the structure to a strong, transparent, elegant skin.”

In an email newsletter from MarketingProfs mentions that a new study has revealed “that ads containing considerable white space lead customers to perceive the advertised product as more prestigious, sophisticated, trustworthy, higher in product quality and leadership, and lower in risk than the same ad without white space.”

A group called MarketingProfs applied this to a company’s brand image, but the concept is highly applicable to web sites — if you cram too much stuff on a web page, users are overwhelmed and often don’t know where to start. Give them some space, use it to direct the reader to what’s important and what you want them to do.

I’d been a faithful Fatcow.com customer until a few months ago. Last year, they upgraded their MySQL servers and downgraded their performance. I had a client whose web site became slower than molasses at times.

When the generally agreed upon length of time someone will wait for a page to load is just at 4 seconds, a 30 second wait time to load a database-driven page is just too slow.

We tried to work with them and communicated the issues as often and in as much detail as possible, but nothing seemed to help.

We just moved this client to Bluehost.com at the recommendation of one of my developers. The site is definitely faster and more responsive. The Bluehost admin panel is cleaner and, so far, easier to use.

At this time, I’m pulling my recommendation from Fatcow and giving it to Bluehost.

If you need web hosting, you can click here.

Some useful tips from Marketing Sherpa, including:

#2. Move your most useful links into the “small window-fold”

Horrible truth — many visitors don’t open windows all the way to see your whole homepage. This is especially true if they’re surfing from search engines or email. Your analytics stats can’t tell you this, but usability clinics will in short order. (Alternatively, just walk around your office looking at your co-workers’ computers. How often do they have several windows open, none using the entire computer screen?)

This means the classic page fold, which all Web designers work so hard to get critical content above, has moved higher than you think. Unless you are in ecommerce or media, however, it’s my experience that the hotlinks your primary audience needs are rarely above that fold.

Instead, many sites use that critical top-and-center real estate for vanity content created by the marketing or branding department. You know it on sight: a big graphic with, perhaps, a tagline. Useful links are often under that — under the fold. It’s now time to move this vanity content elsewhere (for a lab-tested solution, see my hotlink to a new Sherpa research study below).

Read the whole post.