As promised, here’s the video and slides of my “Art of Testing” presentation at the ESWC in Vienna. You may want to grab a coffee first, as it’s over an hour long 
The player will show in this paragraph
Posts Tagged ‘website design’
The Art of Testing – video and slides
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010Top right
Sunday, October 24th, 2010
Through the years I have been experimenting with many different landing page designs and layouts. And there is one factor that’s consistently proving to improve conversion rates.
Or, to be more precise, consistently causes a decrease in conversions every time I stop doing it:
Having my main call-to-actions (Try and Buy) on the top right of the landing page
Sign Up buttons: Red, Green or back to Blue?
Friday, June 4th, 2010
Last week, Dan McGrady reported how he improved his conversion rate by 72%. One of the things he did was changing his signup button from green to red. This alone gave him a 21% increase in conversion.
Interesting results, so I tried some experiments with the color of my own sign up buttons. More »
Website Design: Less is More?
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Once in a while, I try to take a “fresh” look at my website. I just put one of our product pages on my screen, I sit back and try to imagine what it looks like for a new visitor, who just arrived there after a Google Search.
The last time I did this, the main thing that struck me was all the Try/Buy “noise” on the right side of the screen. There’s a Sign Up for the Free Trial box, a Get it Free (TrialPay) option and five (!) different buying options (Standard, Pro, two “Pro + scanner” options, plus a “custom order” option). I realized that I had been replicating most of my shop page right there on the landing page.
So I started experimenting with a different approach, aimed at getting more people to sign up for the free trial. Then just let the trial edition and the autoresponder sequence do the conversion to sales. I didn’t want to remove all buying options though, because we see a lot of customers buying without trying. But it would have to be reduced to just one button, simply taking the user to our recently re-designed shop page. More »
New Collectorz.com shop page
Monday, April 5th, 2010
Here’s something from a project I have been working on off-and-on for the past few months: Rewriting the entire shopping-cart system of the Collectorz.com site.
From the shop, via the upsell interstitial page and the name/address page, to the payment details page and finally the order confirmation page. I have written some new back-end PHP classes and am now rewriting all website pages based on those classes, making the pages more consistent, and more importantly, easier to maintain. Easy maintenance is essential, because I am tweaking these pages quite often.
I have already posted about my upsell interstitial page a while ago, which was the first page I based on the new back-end classes. This long Easter weekend I have completely rewritten the first page of the check-out, the shop page. More »
Using TrialPay on landing pages
Monday, August 10th, 2009
At the SIC in July 2008, WinZip’s Edwin Siebesma told me that I should talk to the TrialPay people. I did and I liked their sales pitch.
Of course, like everyone else who first hears about TrialPay, I had fears of cannibalizing my existing sales by offering a TrialPay option on my website.
So in August 2008 I ran a simple A/B split test, testing just that:
- Group A: my regular product pages, no TrialPay option
- Group B: An extra “Get it Free” button, taking visitors to the TrialPay offer page. Just for our Standard edition (regular price $29.95). The button was a regular HTML button, just like our other “Add to Cart” buttons. Like so ->
New website design finally starts performing
Thursday, May 14th, 2009And a week has gone by again. But now we’re finally seeing better results from the “B design”. Phew…
In terms of numbers of sales, it’s doing about the same as the old design. The profits for category B are slightly higher (about 3%), mainly because the average first purchase is still higher for the new design.
All in all, the new product pages are not a great success. But at least they are now performing well enough to switch to the new pages and start optimizing their details. I already have a couple of ideas I want to try:
- Headlines: Emotional / Fluffy / Benefit oriented vs Practical / Feature oriented
- Pricing: .95 vs rounded pricing
- Upsells: Move stuff like CD Delivery, Priority Support etc… to an interstitial upsell page, as opposed to including them in my “Recommended Buying Choices”
New website design still not winning over old one
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Here’s the results after another week of testing
(results of new design compared to the old design):
- Downloads: down 4.22%
- Sign ups: up 1.50%
- Sales: down 19,11%
- Profits: down 11,52%
- Average First Purchase Value: up 10%
Something’s not right in the new design, but it’s hard to determine what it is.
Yes, I know, that is because we changed too many things at once.
More »
Small tweaks to our website design
Friday, May 1st, 2009The loss of the testimonials on the top right of our new website design kept nagging me. So I discussed it with Mark, one of our web developers. And he came up with an idea to create a nice spot on the top right for one hot testimonial:
More »
New website design, take two
Monday, April 27th, 2009Last week, I told you about the A/B split test I started, comparing my old website design vs a radical new design. I was planning to let it run for 2 weeks, unless the results after 1 week would be dramatic. Well, they are:
These are the results after 7 days (A is the old design, B is the new design):
- Downloads: About the same
- Sign ups: 20 percent more for design B
- Sales: 19 percent less for design B
- Profits: 10 percent less for design B
- Average First Purchase Value: 10 percent higher for B
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