Split testing or A/B testing is the process of creating an alternate web page and tracking its effectiveness compared to the original.  The most popular tool for doing this is Google’s Website Optimizer.  The instructions for creating a split test are quite simple.  Create two versions of a particular page, guide traffic to these two pages equally, and test which one sends users to your desired goal at a higher rate.  You don’t want to make the changes particularly drastic, or you won’t be able to isolate the variable that has the most effect.  An example of a good change to test is the wording of your call to action, or the headline on a page.

Once you have your two different pages, you must also decide what is the result page, or the page that indicates success for your test.  For example, the purchase confirmation page or the demo download or the registration confirmation page.

You then insert some JavaScript code from Google into each of these pages and you’re off and running.  Website Optimizer will automatically split the traffic to your original page between the two different versions, and track which one is most effective at getting users to your success page.  Google website optimizer will gather all the data for you and give a high confidence guess as to which design, or text, is the most effective.  You can then make the change permanent and repeat the process.

Building an effective web site is not a one time task.  Its an iterative cycle of developing, testing, adjusting and re-developing.  Using split tests is a great way to get results for your business.

Goals

The first items you should consider in the web design process are your goals for the site.  As much as possible, these goals should be tangible and quantifiable.  For instance, one obvious goal would be to increase online sales or lead generation.  Other less measurable goals would be increased visibility or an improved image for your business.  Just like any good marketing piece, you need to establish what you are trying to achieve first.

Target Audience and Use Cases

Once you’ve decided what you’d like your web site to accomplish,  you need to figure out who you are trying to reach.  Are you trying to get new customers, or provide your existing customers with some information.  Your site may have several different intended audiences.  One extremely effective method of focusing the content on your web site is by creating use cases.  Using the target audience and goals that you’ve previously outlined, you create several imaginary users for your web site.  Each user will have a need that your web site should fulfill.  It often helps to give these users names so that you can identify with them better and reference them throughout the process.  Here is an example I could use for my web design web site; Bob is the owner of Bob’s Hot Air Balloons (Target Audience: Small Business Owners).  Bob has an existing web site but is interested in giving it a new look.  Taking these factors into account I would create a design portfolio section for my web site which includes examples of my design work.  On that page I would also include a link to the contact form so that if Bob likes what he sees he can take the next step and get more information (Goal: Lead Generation).  Every page on your web site should fulfill a use case that combines your target audience and one of their goals.

Information Architecture

The three steps above should guide you towards a nice outline of pages that you’re going to need and roughly what you’ll need on each page.  You’ll now need to go through those pages and try to group them in a way that streamlines your site.  You’ll want your users to find what they are looking for in as few clicks as possible, so organizing the site with that in mind should lead to a nice slim, easy to use site.  Remember to minimize the confusion and always try to guide your users towards their goals.

Copy Writing

Of course, you’ll have to write the copy that goes on all of these pages as well, which can be an art form in and of itself.  Try to approach your site from an outsiders perspective.  Don’t use industry jargon or unnecessarily complicated words.  Be direct and to the point.  You’ll also want to keep your tone of voice in mind; is your company young and hip, or distinguished and trusted, these different tones should come out in your copy.  A professional web writer could go a long way to improving your voice on the web.

Wireframe

By now you have a pretty good idea of what is going to be on each page of your website.  Its time to start laying things out.  You’ll want to start with just black and white shapes and boxes. When you are done you’ll have what is called a wireframe, a skeleton of your future site.  Try to get an idea of where things will go on the page; Will your logo be on the top left, or top right?  Do you want a horizontal or vertical navigation bar?  What other content areas should be on every page?

Interface Design

Now it’s time to think about those colors and other graphical elements.  Like the way you thought about your tone during the copy writing, you’ll need to think about your look at this stage.  Are you a technical company with widgets and a very modern vibe,  or are you dependable and solid, with a more traditional look.  You should think about what kind of imagery and photography you want to use, and if you want to have custom photographs taken or use stock photography.

Functionality/Usability

As the site is being developed, it is important to think about how your users are navigating your site.  You want to help them reach the information they are looking for as quickly as possible with as few mistakes as possible, resulting in happiness with their experience and your business.  Is there a way to add a search feature to help them find the product they are looking for? Does that form really need all the fields you are asking for?  Can there be fewer steps in the checkout process? Your users will thank you and the results will show up on your bottom line.

Follow-up/Tracking/Content Management

Don’t forget to update your web site frequently.  You’ll want to keep the content fresh to keep visitors coming back.  Also be sure to check your stats and analytics to make sure all the goals that you thought about early on are being met, or find out what tweaks you need to make.

Your web site acts as your marketing, sales, lead generation, store and product fulfillment for your clients.  By following the process outlined above you can’t help but give this critical portion of your business the thought and preparation it needs.

1) Outdated information

If clients are calling disconnected phone numbers and your latest press release is from 2003 then you’ve got a problem.  It is absolutely imperative that you keep the information on your website current.  If that is too difficult, then perhaps you need to consider number 2.

2) Old content management system (or none at all)

If number 2 is an issue for you then the reason is probably that you have an old content management system, or none at all.  Content management systems are software that reside on your web server that make it easy for a non-technical user to make simple changes to a website.  Nowadays there are several extremely good, free, open-source content management systems that work with every size site from a couple of pages of brochure ware to a robust database driven site.  Older content management systems may be clunky and hard to use,  often making it more difficult to update the website than if there were none at all.  Every modern website needs a modern content management system.  Unfortunately, it is not something that can be added on, the site must be built from the ground up with one of these packages

3) Poorly organized content

Research has shown that if a user cannot find what their looking for on your site within 3 clicks then they will leave.  If your site is large and convoluted or hard to navigate, then it’s time to rethink the way the content is organized.

4) Design trends have changed

You’re not still wearing tie dye shirts and sporting the side ponytail (at least I hope you’re not) so why should you’re website look like it’s stuck in the 80′s.  Online trends change quickly and you need to keep up.  If customers come to your site and think it looks outdated then, that is how they are going to think about your company.  If you portray a clean up-to-date look then your clients will get the perception that you are on top of your industry’s trends as well.

5) Your site looks really really tiny

As hardware improves the sizes of monitors increase, and the standard screen resolution of monitors also increases.  If your site was built to an older standard you may need a magnifying glass to view it.  This will create problems with font sizes, readability, and usability.

I’ll try to skip the shameless plug, but if any of these situations applies to your website, then its high time you considered hiring a professional to help you get a fresh start.

Think of your website as a restaurant.  On a normal business day, customers will come in to request some food.  If your restaurant is running smoothly, your staff will serve up the requested food in reasonable time period; the customers will eat happily, pay and move on.  You will then be able to replace them with another stream of customers.

Now think of a Distributed Denial of Service attack as an unexpected huge surge in customers, all of whom enter your restaurant at once.  They take up all of your space, your servers and hosts are over-extended trying to seat them and take their orders.  As a result, other customers cannot get in to your restaurant to eat.  The worst part is, these customers aren’t going buy anything.  They’re just going to take up space in your restaurant, preventing others from getting in.  From outside the restaurant, customers see that it is completely full and they have no chance of getting a table.  You’ve lost their business.

From this example, you may see why it is also so hard to defend against a this type attack.  To your restaurant, that large party looks just like any other customer, so you can’t turn them away.  To a website, the traffic coming from a denial of service attack looks just like normal traffic.  Servers and firewalls can’t be configured to block the attack because they don’t know which traffic is from real customers and which is fake traffic designed to stress your resources.  This is especially true of a Distributed attack, which utilizes infected computers all over the world to send the traffic.

The good news for smaller businesses is that typically you do not provide the infrastructure for your own website.  Your site is hosted by a professional hosting company that has redundant resources which are able to withstand the attack and hopefully keep your site running.  Extremely high end firewalls and traffic filters can identify patterns in the traffic from these attacks and block them as they come in.  Typically, hosting providers and Internet service providers will need to become involved to track down the originating source of the attack, and shut it down.

The first thing I did was have a look at our IIS web logs.  Considering we get about 20,000 page views a day, parsing the raw logs was somewhat arduous.  We use and love Google Analytics for our web stats, but it doesn’t provide the information I was looking for; specifically which files (js ,css ,jpg, whichever) were the most responsible for bandwidth transfer.  Basically,  what are the biggest files that get requested the most often.  I imported the logs into an analytics program and pored over the results.

What I keyed in on were a couple of scenarios:

1) The main header graphic for our site was large at almost 100KB, it was included on every page, and it was a png.  I had our graphics guy convert the file to a jpg at a slightly lower quality and he got it down to 20KB.  An 80KB per page savings.

2)  We use some fairly standard JavaScript libraries on our site and we were hosting the files on our own server, and (again) they were included on every page.  Google provides free hosting of some common AJAX API’s, so I included the files from Google’s server instead of our own.

The next and last thing I did is something that everyone should do.  I enabled gzip compression in IIS.  Gzip is a form of compression based on the deflate algorithm that can reduce the size of text markup by up to 75%.  All modern web browsers decompressgzip on the fly,  so the end result is not only reduced transfer size,  but also increased speed.  I’ll go over how to enable gzip compression in a future post.

At the end of the day we were able to reduce our bandwidth consumption by about 25% (which for us was roughly 100GB a month).

For more tips on increasing the speed of your site and reducing bandwidth check out http://code.google.com/speed/.

Sure, for individuals the site can be a simple messaging service, meant to keep their friends up to date on their mundane daily activities. It started as an update on the old Instant Messenger away status, where you’d put in a clever remark and hope all your friends responded while you were away. But the real point of twitter is this: Where else can nearly 2 million people have a personal conversation with Shaquille O’Neal , or petition the Prime Minister of England, or get instant tech support from a live representative of the Geek Squad. Twitter is the first mechanism that allows a direct personal connection between your business and your customers on a large scale.

In the past communications between businesses and consumers have been run through the filter of publicity agents, marketing departments and copy editors. TV commercials spend months in production, print ads are designed and redesigned ad nauseam, and celebrities can’t say anything in public that hasn’t been approved by their agents. But consumers aren’t stupid, they know when they’re getting highly polished spin, and it prevents them from forming a real connection with the company. When used properly, twitter can help break down the wall between your company and your customers, leading to great feedback, new product ideas and more sales.

Twitter has a great primer on their site for how businesses can use the service including some case studies the really illustrate the point: http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/

Leave me a comment if you’ve found successful uses for Twitter in your business. And of course, you should follow me on twitter here.